Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World (review)

At a time when Cultural Studies is vying with English studies, this book seems to have been titled for market appeal. It should have been more accurately called International Milton Symposium 1991: a selection of papers, for that is what it is. Only eight of its 21 essays fall under “Poetry and Politics” (Part III), the others under “The Prophetic Voice” (Part I) and “Gender and Personal Identities” (Part III). As P.G. Stanwood explains in his introduction, this tripartite grouping derives from three plenary addresses at the 1991 Vancouver symposium: Louis Martz’s paper on prophecy, Mary Ann Radinowicz’s on gender, and Balachandra Rajan’s on politics.

Martz’s “Milton’s Prophetic Voice: Moving Toward Paradise” opens Part I and explores parallels between the techniques of Old Testament prophets and that of Milton in some of his prose works and Paradise Lost. Pointing to the methods of Amos, Jeremiah, and especially Isaiah in shaping a “personal excursus” (7), Martz illuminates the cadenza effect of those passages in The Reason of Church Goverment, the Second Defence, and Paradise Lost in which Milton stages the emerging of his own prophetic voice. I use the term cadenza because Martz also alerts us to the auditory effects of Milton’s work, particularly of his Latin writings. He stresses Milton’s saturation in Latin during the years 1650–55 and the flow-on into the “great suspended cadences” of Paradise Lost (12). Martz could well have related this to another, seminally important, context: Milton’s 22 years of blindness (1652–74), a way of life which was necessarily strongly aural and out of which Paradise Lost was produced.

The emphasis of this book, the editor claims, is “above all on issues of context” (xvi). The current renewal of contextual studies indeed represents English’s answer to Cultural Studies. So how well do these essays deal with context, with Milton’s “world”? Unevenly, although this is a weakness unavoidable with collections. Moreover, many of these essays address context only minimally, scarcely departing from textual/New Critical/classroom exegesis.

In Part I, Lee M. Johnson’s “Language and the Illusion of Innocence in Paradise Lost” neither justifies its presence under “The Prophetic Voice” nor refers to Milton’s world, but is a careful study of Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian language with some postscript comparisons with Wordsworth. David Robertson’s textual analysis, “Soliloquy and Self in Milton’s Major Poems,” is of a similar order. Both of these essays could have fruitfully related their subject to Milton’s world, specifically to seventeenth century ideas about speech and the Fall. Stella P.Revard’s essay on Lycidas also appears under “The Prophetic Voice” but mentions neither prophecy nor Joseph Wittreich’s authoritative work on Lycidas as prophecy; it is a contextual study in that it explores the poem as a commemorative ode in the Pindaric tradition. Looking at another context, Douglas Chambers relates Book XII of Paradise Lost to the “synoptic” art of the Renaissance, particularly tapestries. T. H. Howard-Hill offers a well supported argument against the notion constructed earlier this century that Milton was involved with contemporary drama; it is salutary to be persuaded once and for all that this was not a Miltonic context.

In the leading article of Part II (“Gender and Personal Identities”), Mary Ann Radzinowicz argues that Milton read the stories of four women of Genesis—Sarah, Lot’s (unnamed) wife, Dinah, and Tamar—in such a way as to focus on sexual difference, the social relativism of gender concerns, and the application of these stories to social and political power in Milton’s time. Radzinowicz draws her evidence from outlines of dramas in the Trinity manuscript and references across Milton’s prose works. A general value of her study is the recognition of Milton’s “respect for difference” (151) and of the varied contexts of his work, including Christian, Judaic, and classical...