The Muse's Method: Its Making and Early Reception

The Muse's Method: Its Making and Early Reception Paul Stanwood asked me to give one of the plenary sessions at the Fourth International Milton Symposium at the University ofBritish Columbia, Vancouver, in August, 1991. Since I had enjoyed getting together my essay on the Herbert book, I suggested trying to do a similarjob with my book on Paradise Lost. It was scheduled on Wednesday, our "vacation day," after luncheon at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. It was thefirst time I had attempted to give a lecture after acquiring artificial kneejoints , andI was delighted to discover thatI could standforfifty minutes without pain — as well as to find that a friendly audience of Miltonists seemed to enjoy it. It has not been published previously. I must have been exposed to some of the shorter poems of Milton (along with those of Longfellow, Lowell, and Bliss Carmen) in grade school and junior high school, but I have little memory of specific poems and only a general sense of distaste for the name of Milton by the time I got to high school. But I didn't care much for most of the poetry I knew then. By the time I was five or six, when my mother, sitting in a drafty hall, read Treasure Island aloud to us while my brother Hollis was mysteriously confined to bed, with a long and never properly diagnosed illness, in one room and I was isolated with whooping cough in the room across the hall, I much preferred fiction to verse. Later, after I learned to read, I read an astonishing amount of junk, but I much preferred the junk to what we were taught in school. When earnest and well meaning teachers made us memorize speeches from Julius Caesar or The Tempest 80On The Muse's Method without understanding much about either the plays or the syntax of the lines, I found them boring. With poetry, I frequently had no idea what the poem or poet was trying to do — what the point of it all was — even when I understood most of the syntax and some of the allusions. Paradise Lost suffered when we read a few passages from it in an English class during my senior year in high school. My attempt to read them was not at all helped by the performance of a girl in the class who claimed that she had read the entire poem (I did not believe her), and that she had enjoyed it tremendously. I knew from my reading of the Bible that if, as she insisted, Milton had based his poem on the Bible, she must have got a good deal of the poem's theology wrong. By the end of those few classes on Paradise Lost I could hardly imagine that anyone had ever really enjoyed reading the poem, and I was prepared to suspect the worst of anyone who claimed to have done so. Although I mildly disliked most of my English courses in high school (those in algebra and chemistry were my favorites), I enjoyed reading more than anything else, and I kept a sort of faith that eventually I would find teachers and contemporaries who were interested in reading and talking about reading in ways I would find congenial. When I registered at Harvard I intended to major in English, and I enrolled in English 1 as well as the required composition course, English A. Instead of the usual survey, in 1937-38 English 1 was an experimental course. When we were assigned for the first three weeks a substantial number of The Canterbury Tales in the World's Classics edition, with little recognition that the reading was in a language rather different from that which we ordinarily spoke or read (there were no notes on the pages, and it took me some while to discover the brief glossary at the back of the volume), I wondered whether I might be incapable of doing college work in English. In the next three weeks we read, with analogously little preparation, five plays by Marlowe. I found them easier to understand line by line than Chaucer, but I also found the ten acts of...