Balanced in Time: Paradise Regained and the Centre of the Miltonic Vision

GORDON TESKEY Balanced in Time: Paradise Regained and the Centre of the Miltonic Vision I When attempting to describe the works of a great artist with a long career it is often necessary to maintain an attitude that permits each of his works to be two things at once: each must be seen as a separate creation with its own formal integrity and, at the same time, as part of a total movement in the artist's creative imagination towards the realization of a larger, inexhaustible vision. The thematic and symbolic unity of the canon as a whole is thus the result of the integrity of the larger imaginative vision it partially realizes in art. We are more likely to think of the creators of giant ruins in this way, of Michelangelo, or Spenser, or Pound, than to apply such an idea to artists like Dante and Milton whose individual works are in themselves so finished and complete. But Dante and Milton constantly point to the incompleteness of the work with respect to the larger vision it projects; and what seems most astonishing about artists of their stature is the impression that, while their works show an intense unity and completeness of vision within a tremendous variety of forms, their imaginations seem inexhaustible, as if works even as large as the Divina Commedia and Milton's epics are dwarfed by the extent of the imaginative vision that has brought them into being. The Vita Nuova is a work entirely different in genre and in style from the Divina Commedia, yet it is part of the same vision, just as 'Lycidas,' a poem with its own formal integrity and thematic independence, takes an important place in the larger scheme of Milton's reuvre as an initiation into the prophetic vision of the epics. With artists who have achieved in their work a scale and order like that of Dante and Milton it is necessary to regard each work with the kind of double-consciousness that we experience in metaphor, recognizing the distinctness of each part while perceiving the thematic harmonies that bring the parts of the canon together into a unified whole. This point is particularly important when we turn to Paradise Regained, where the issue of the relation of the poem to Paradise Lost has led early critics to argue that it is a pendent of its predecessor while later critics, in order to defend the poem, have often felt it necessary to understate its obvious relation to Paradise Lost. While few writers would want to be forced into choosing one extreme or the other, there is a general tendency to emphasize either separateness or continuity, depending upon what aspects of the poem one wishes to explore, without directly approaching UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 50, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1981 0042-0247/81/0500-0269$01.5010 lCl UN IVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 270 GORDON TESKEY the question of how the poem may be both at the same time.' It has often been correctly pointed out that in many ways Paradise Regained is a very different creative project from Paradise Lost, and must be appreciated on different aesthetic grounds, a tendency that culminates in Barbara Lewalski's thorough demonstration of the generic separateness of Paradise Regained from Paradise Lost. 2 With the poem thus freed from the shadow of its predecessor some critics have explored its relation to Samson Agonistes. While the argument that the brief epic and the tragedy are apposite in some very calculated way is perhaps overstated, Balachandra Rajan skilfully describes the 'cumulative force'>of Milton's work and its imaginative integrity as a total vision, pointing out affinities not only between Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes but also between Paradise Regained and the final two books of Paradise Lost. By indicating some of the patterns that continue to elaborate themselves throughout Milton's career Rajan elicits what he calls 'the unifying energy of the creative mind at work and the persistence over many years of that mind's basic patterns' (p 110). At the centre of these patterns is the figure of man who must learn, in the words of the early sonnet, to 'stand and...