Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost (review)

It is worth the price of the book just to find out how subtly words like experience or occult were used by people like Francis Bacon or Robert Boyle-and also by Milton. Edwards is also not content to let a word like charlatan go by without examination of a real Italian ciarlatàno, observed in the street by Samuel Purchas, a mountebank fooling people by his deceitful patter (ciàrla) and tricks that deceived the eye, in order to sell the equivalent of snake oil. Aha, you say, snake oil: isn’t that what Eve buys? Yes, that’s the point. Satan is indeed a charlatan who sells Eve the equivalent of snake oil-the forbidden fruit-in the process of practicing a combination of black magic, snake-oil salesmanship, and pseudo-religious patter.

Karen Edwards begins by gently but firmly proving that Kester Svendsen in Milton and Science sent a generation of Milton scholars down the wrong trail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1956). Svendsen pictured Milton as a fossilized old Elizabethan with a backward view of the New Philosophy: “it is the old science, rather than the new, which bulks large in Milton” (3). Svendsen in turn caused William Riley Parker and others to believe that Paradise Lost is “the monument to scientific backwardness” that Svendsen saw it as (Edwards 4). Instead, the poem is “cognizant of the century’s new experience of the natural world” (4) as embodied in the research methods and publications of Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne (especially in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica), Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and John Evelyn. Bacon gave Milton an empirical attitude towards scientific observation, Browne gave him a skeptical eye, Hooke gave him a microscopic perspective, Boyle gave him some keys to understanding the inner workings of the human body, and Evelyn defined pestilential smog and unnatural air pollution for him.

Edwards concentrates on the book of nature in the first major division of her book, on animals in the second part, and on plants in the third, firmly placing the experimentalism of the Baconian empiricists in the study of nature according to Milton. Experience, not abstraction; the world of observation, not speculation; inductive classification, not classical precedent, instructs Milton when he describes plants and animals, in Eden and out of it. Edwards finds Milton agreeing with the Baconians. “Deductive arguments can be deceptive . . . ; it is better to rely solidly upon matters of fact” (19). Milton is un-superstitious about science, and un-sentimental, and un-nostalgic. His serpent makes vocal sounds by using his tongue “as if it were a musical instrument (specifically an organ)” (25). Satan is the embodiment of a snake-oil salesman, as well, anti-scientific, a mountebank, a quack: he combines salesmanship with false oratory and false theology. Satan is not an empiricist (33).

Expanding on what she means by linking science and poetry in her subtitle, Edward summarizes: “Milton’s poetic style-his ‘infinite suggestiveness’-is exactly what we should expect of one who advocates an experimental reading of the natural world” (47). As with Browne’s suggestive and punning prose style, Milton’s poetry “generated rather than closed off enquiry” (56). By p. 70, Edwards can boldly announce

It is the thesis of this book that the natural world represented in Paradise Lost yields its interpretive riches upon an experimental reading and that comprising those riches are the reveries, discoveries, and uncertainties of experimental philosophy in its first, exhilarating decades.

(70)

Sphinx, chimaera, griffin, amphisboena, leviathan; Tree of Forbidden Fruit, figs, roses, balsam: trust Karen Edwards to tell you exactly what was thought about each mythical (or were they?) plant or beast. Even though, as literary critics, we have been trained to think in terms of imagery, of rhetorical tropes, or allegory, a bird may just be a bird, and a rose is a rose is a rose, in Milton as in Gertrude Stein. Edwards has discovered, for instance, that thornless roses were not just a...