Seven Types of Milton Criticism

Review Article Seven Types of Milton Criticism' Milton's poetry has always provided an arena for the contentions of critical schools because of its range, the depth of its unifying principles, its cathartic function in resolving its author's tensions, the shifting of attitude under way in his day and continuing in ours. This is illustrated for the present by the rather mixed bag of recent studies listed in our note; and the following comments should therefore, though inevitably and painfully superficial, be of some interest not only to militant Miltonists but to less sectarian readers attentive to the character of Hterary studies in general. What is demonstrated by this accidental collection, partly British, largely American, is the extraordinary vitality and variety of current academic criticism and its impressive level of intention and accomplishment. Milton criticism is even more than usually symptomatic at the moment because of his peculiar status and the special character of the critical con~ tention over him. For many general readers he remains the symbol of an other-worldly perfectionism, a conventional rigidity, a cold moralism. There cannot be many these days who read him privately for inspiration or for pleasure; fewer read him for both. A "Milton festival" would seem to some profane, to most a contradiction in terms. His direct influence on practising poets is still probably not much above its lowest point since 1645, despite some revision of the wasteland and penitential opinions of the twenties and thirties. So little is his poetry current among the literati that it must be long since anyone has been heard to utter, during one of those delightful intermissions wherein the avant garde unsweats itself from its labours, even the classic critical comment beginning "Malt does more than Milton can" and ending not with a whine or a whimper but with a vaguely irreverent misquotation. Yet the prominent place Milton at present occupies among the pocket-books and in all liberal-arts, great-authors. or survey-of-Englishliterature courses, is not merely the result of his historical importance or the forceful zeal of the kind of persons he frequently attracts as his interpreters . If this may be taken as illustrating the gap between contemporary taste and educational endeavour, the lively response of many students to his poetry would surprise the middle-aged who still regard him from an anti-Puritan or anti-Victorian viewpoint. It suggests that the gap between generations is apt just now to manifest itself in ways that would astonish nineteenth-century liberals and radicals-and do astonish their survivors among us. If Milton seems at first remote and forbidding to such students, 494 MILTON CRITICISM 495 they are entirely likely to find (with good teaching) tbat his poetry is so far from being a monument to dead ideas that what is apparently remote and forbidding about it is a cballenge and a device designed to throw into focused relief insights into the realities of human experience that are as valid for the twentieth as they were for the seventeenth century, however they may have been missed by lost generations. All the items in our note are concerned to bridge these gaps, either by the application of new critical methods or by the modified application of old ones; and it is this endeavour that has of late intensified once more the traditional conflict of critical opinion over Milton. Milton's interpreters have always been notable for their imitation of the disputatiousness and assertiveness sometimes displayed by their subject, but lately they have tended to divide (or to be divided) into two sharply opposed camps. On the one hand are the academic humanists, historians of culture and especially of ideas, who are supposed to think of poetry in terms of rational statement-"denotatively" was yesterday the word-and of the "neo-classical" canons of form, and to approach it through the traditional methods of humanism (or, more pejoratively, the graduate school), ideologically, ethically, historically, biographically, prosodically, pbilologically , and so fortb. On the other hand are those-loosely and inaccurately called "new" critics since their ways resist any more generic categorization-who are supposed to think such methods render poetry an absolutely dead thing and who...