The Many Faces of Milton

Quartercentenary celebrations of Milton's birth, culminating in the Ninth International Milton Symposium which convened in THE London in July 2008, have seen many professional Miltonists stopping to reflect on the relevance of Milton to contemporary readers and societies. In fact, the real question that seemed to be on everybody's mind was the relevance and trajectory of Milton criticism itself. Like any field of literary study, Milton criticism is subject to fashions and trends which tend to swing from one extreme to another. A certain approach first creeps in from the margins, then takes over the middle ground, only to overstay its welcome, before being marginalised by a new fashionable approach which, more often than not, is a very old one making a disguised comeback.

As a subject of literary study, however, Milton is quite unlike any other in that his authorial personae and the critical premium placed on his explicit and implied intentions continue to tyrannise over his texts to such an extent that his poetry and prose tend to confound theoretical impositions and critical trends. When, for example, earlier in the twentieth century the New Critics attempted to declare the death of the author and treat only the formal implications of Milton's poetry and style, Milton the author simply refused to die, just as when, later in the century, deconstructive critics discovered that their fierce Derridean battle cry, 'there is nothing outside the text', turned into a feeble sigh of resignation: 'there is only Milton in the text'. Conversely, when the New Historicists and then so-called cultural materialist scholars attempted to replace the avatar-like image of Milton as an isolated poet of genius with a complex historical phenomenon rooted in cultural and political contexts, the timeless power of said phenomenon's artistic singularity continually resisted, and still resists, any attempt to grind the poems into fine historical dust. When Shakespeare scholars are taken to task for their Bardology, there is some merit in the argument that the link between any extant texts of a given Shakespearian play and its author's great mind is treacherous. But in Milton's case there can be no such distinctions, not because we can establish Milton's authorship of his works with less controversy, but because Milton himself and the very idea of his authorship are written everywhere into his poetry and prose. It is precisely because of this that what Harold Bloom called long ago now the 'scandal of Milton's continued authority'¹ has always been something of a blessing to Milton studies; it has ensured that the best critical examinations of Milton's works and his literary-intellectual legacy are those which rise above theoretical propositions and merely contextual implications to engage with Milton's art and mind on Milton's terms, or rather on the terms which Milton everywhere writes into his intensely dialectical, self-examining literature.

Milton's complex authorial presence as both the subject and check of Milton criticism at large is a consequence of his obsessive fascination with himself. He effectively lived parallel lives: on the one hand, he was the bookish, fiercely intelligent scholar, pamphleteer, and radical social and political visionary, who put pen to paper when most men used the sword, and who for all his political pains and religious idealism died in an ideological wasteland, a disillusioned blind revolutionary. On the other hand, he cultivated in the poetry and prose the image of himself as a chosen prophet of God, a divinely appointed and inspired Christian Homer who had come to know not only how and why we lost Paradise, but also how to regain it. The historical Milton, as numerous scholarly biographers have shown, was a thoroughly sociable person, naturally...