Milton and Homer: "Written to Aftertimes"

Four “From the First”: Conceptions of Origins and Their Consequences

93 FOUR “From the First”  Conceptions of Origins and Their Consequences One of the primary discursive mechanisms by which Paradise Lost was established and has been maintained in the literary canon is the notion of originality. At least as early as 1704, in John Dennis’s Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, Paradise Lost was being canonized on the basis of its being “an Original Poem; that is to say, a Poem that should have his own Thoughts, his own Images, and his own Spirit.”1 Later in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson similarly praised Milton’s originality (though with some reservation): “The highest praise of genius is original invention. Milton cannot be said to have contrived the structure of an epick poem, and therefore owes reverence to that vigor and amplitude of mind to which all generations must be indebted for the art of poetical narration....But of all the borrowers from Homer Milton 94 Milton and Homer is perhaps the least indebted.”2 Moreover, Johnson links the value of Paradise Lost, what we would call its canonical status, to this quality of originality by observing that Milton’s “work is not the greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first.”3 The quality of originality, moreover, continues to this day to play a role in maintaining Milton’s canonical status. Barbara Lewalski’s recent biography of Milton, for example, counts “stunning originality ” as one of the “constants in Milton’s poetry.”4 In this chapter, I argue that Milton anticipated the role that the term original would play in the canonization of his epic, and that he did so in part by observing the way in which Homer’s epics were being canonically reproduced in his own day. I argue further that Milton’s conception of originality—developed at a time when the word original was undergoing a semantic shift, and participating in both the established and emerging senses of the term—might help us better conceptualize the position Milton saw his epic as inhabiting within the epic tradition. Origins However instrumental the concept of originality may have been in the process by which Paradise Lost initially achieved and has since maintained its canonical status, we must recognize that the concept of originality is rich and complex, that the meaning of the word original has been historically variable, and that it was in Milton’s day only just beginning to acquire the specific shade of meaning by which it has since come to serve as a laudatory term within literary criticism. The OED’s earliest witness for the word original in the sense of “not imitated from another” is the preface to John Dryden’s 1700 Fables Ancient and Modern, where he announces that to his imitations of Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio he has “added some Original papers of [his] own.” Of course, our earliest witness of a term’s use is only rarely that term’s first actual use. And in this instance, one can be more certain than usual that Dryden is not here coining this sense of the “From the First” 95 term; since the word appears in the same sense in the subtitle of his book (Translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace and Chaucer: With Original Poems), Dryden obviously did not feel that he needed any context in order to make this sense of the term clear, as he likely would have felt had he thought he was advancing a new sense for the word original. So, rather than assigning the new sense of the word original to 1700, we should perhaps say, more generally, that in the later seventeenth century a new sense of the meaning of originality was beginning to emerge.5 The previous dominant sense of the word original was “that from which something arises, proceeds, or is derived” (a sense that is still current, for example, in the “original” from which photocopies are made). Milton uses the word in this sense when, for example, Beelzebub predicts that future generations of humankind will curse Adam and Eve as their “frail originals” (2.375). We should mark, though, that the sense attested in the Dryden quotation is not simply a slightly different shade of meaning accruing to an existing term. The sense of original that emerged in the later seventeenth century represents a diametrical reversal in the temporal perspective from which originality is viewed: the older...