Humanities: Literary Studies

HUMAt.""'fiTIES 395 experience, in short, by visionary revelation. It is the vision from outside nature but within Man which impels Man back toward Paradise. Being ultimately but of nature, like Yeats' Byzantium, Paradise is something to be regained only by resisting what nature alone has to offer. The·myth of the return of·Eden is therefore a revolutionary myth, but because Milton was concerned with ultimate precedents the myth was, Frye says, not Utopian but Arcadian. Hence his disenchantment with politics was inevitable and Paradise Lost is .hardly a consolation prize for the failure of the Puritan Revolution. In Paradise Regained the pattern is complete. Fallen nature, the wilderness, is the hell which is harrowed by the Second Adam who symbolically as the Word of God becomes for regenerate men the Paradise within. However, in the seclusion of this essential action Frye sees a reminder that the garden within is at best only the penultimate stage, an expression of what he calls the central myth of mankind, the myth of lost identity. In Frye's peroration it is the transcendence of self which is the ultimate beatitude, and we are almost convinced that Milton, the least mystical of major Christian·poets, who consistently assumed the indissolubility of individual identity even within the presence of God, was more of a mystic than we had ever imagined him to be. Implicit is the conviction, we are told, that "the i:ecovery of identity is not the feeling that I am myself and.not another, but the realization that there is only one man, one mind, and one world, and that all walls of partition have been broken down forever." If Milton never said this, as he never said a number of other more penetrating things .which Frye · elicits from his work, it is notwithstanding an advantage to have the inexhaustible evocativeness of these great epics so well demonstrated. (MrcHAEL FIXLER) His reputation firmly established among Miltonists since the publication of his Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641-1660 in 1942, Professor Arthur E. Barker has added an edition of selected modem critical · essays on Milton to his impressive bibliography, Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by Arthur E. Barker (Oxford University Press, pp. 483, $2.~5). His selections were guided by two purposes, stated in his preface: to "revieW: Milton's poetic .career" and to "illustrate the varieties of approach to and interpretation of Milton." Both difficult tasks are accomplished surprisingly well, considerfug the volume of Milton publication over the past thirty years. While each Milton scholar may wince at the omission ·of some favourite essay· or the inclusion of some pet peeye 396 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1965 (though Professor Barker's choices make the latter unlikely), the consensus will probably be that the editor has exercised excellent judgment , especially in excluding "certifiable eccentriCities." We are reminded that from "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough" (examined by Hugh N. Maclean) to Samson Agonistes (considered by A. S. P. Woodhouse and John M. Steadman) is a long and hard but perpetually rewarding way. We are also reminded that just as great critics of our day-Lewis, Bush, Hughes, Tuve-have followed the giants of other days and surpassed them, so there are younger but no less able critics- A. B. Chambers, Thomas Wheeler- writing today and carrying on the "increasingly knowledgeable and perceptive character of commentary on Milton" observed by Professor Barker in his career. Professor Barker's valuable editorial notes point the reader to studies too recent to have been cited in the essays; spot checking shows that he carefully chose these citations for their relevance to the essay at hand and not (as one sometimes suspects an editor of doing) for their impres- - siveness as a list of "see also." The total result is thirty-three essays, of which twenty-five w.ere originally journal articies, four are excerpts from books, and four are from special collections of essays. Among journals carrying essays on Milton deemed by Professor Barker worthy of inclusion , PMLA leads with five essays; UTQ, PQ, ELH, and JEGP first published three each; MP two; and SP, RES, MLN, Anglia, The Yale...