The Miltonic Moment (review)

At a cursory glance, J. Marin Evans’s scholarly output on Milton resembles the poetic career of his subject: a brief, yet promising early yield with Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) and an edition of Paradise Lost, IX and X, for Cambridge Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), followed by a long period of relative abeyance in which his only published book was a monograph on Lycidas (1983), culminating in renewed intensity nearly thirty years later with Milton’s Imperial Epic (Ithica: Cornell UP,1996) and most recently The Miltonic Moment. However, in keeping with this anal ogy, the richness of his work since his return suggests that he spent the interim years neglecting his scholarly vocation about as much as Paradise Lost suggests that the years of Milton’s own hiatus from poetry were squandered. Evans’s penultimate work is impressive precisely because it recognizes contemporary discourses on colonialism as a context for understanding the epic without reducing it to a discourse on imperialism. His most recent work focuses this balanced, judicious approach on Milton’s primary early works: On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, A Mask performed at Ludlow Castle, and Lycidas. For Evans, the term “Miltonic Moment” designates the “decisive instance” or “a moment of crisis” within a recurring structure of transformation he finds throughout these and all Milton’s poetry “that takes place immediately before the plot undergoes a dramatic change of course”(2). Because it bridges the transitional space between “a past that is about to be superseded and repudiated” and a “future that will begin to unfold as soon as the poem is over,” the Miltonic Moment is imbued simultaneously with sense of presentness and intermediacy (2). Evans’s purpose is to define the particular shape of this process as it manifests itself in early works then to relate it to the immediate conditions of both Milton’s own life and his particular cultural “moment.” The new readings Evans’s study generates as he works through critical problems makes The Miltonic Moment a particularly timely addition to the study of Milton.

The concept that Milton’s poems take place at the transitional moment separating two momentous events provides Evans with a broad compass within which he can inscribe the particular transforma-tional process as it occurs in these three distinctive poems. The first chapter “The Poetry of Absence,” argues that the Nativity Ode takes place in the moment between the departure of the pagan deities and the event that would ultimately usher in the “age of Gold.” Evans views the expulsion of the deities defining the poem’s “moment” as part of a general pattern in which all “intermediaries” standing between the reader and the event celebrated in the Ode are removed(16). Disputing inveterate under-standing of the poem as an account of Milton’s personal conversion, Evans argues that, through this removal, the Ode “performs” an act of conversion, not only on its readers, but also on its classical source of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue which it “regenerates” in terms of Puritan theology. To convert Virgil’s eclogue, Milton’s Ode enacts strategies of inclusion and exclusion which resemble those enacted by and against seventeenth-century Puritans. Evans points out, however, that these opposing strategies seem to entail a contradiction—one which he resolves by explaining how contradictions of regeneration are inherent in the paradoxical idea of Christian conversion itself, which in Augustinian terms asserts the continuity and absolute disjunction between the “old” and “new man” of God.

Continuing with the idea of the Miltonic moment as contradiction, the second chapter, “Virtue and Virginity,” examines what Evans believes is an often overlooked textual crux in Comus’s conception of sexual “virtue”—that the masque simultaneously recommends both “temperance” (sex sanctioned within marriage) and virginity (absolute abstinence). Evans resolves this contradiction by appealing to the textual history of the masque itself, which, he holds, “[b]etween 1634–1637 . . . passed through a prolonged Miltonic moment, during the course of which it was...