Recent Books on Spenser and Milton

REVIEWS RECENT BOOKS ON SPENSER AND MILTON* A.S.P. Woodhouse had a useful bit of advice ready at hand for students who clung doggedly to eccentric interpretations of particular poems: 'If the pattern doesn't fit the poem, don't throw away the poem: throw away the pattern.' The books assembled here for review variously and instructively illustrate the wisdom of that observation. The patterning ofstructure, imagery, or informing idea in the poetry ofSpenserand Milton is a centrally significant concern for almost all thesecritics; each brings something new to scholarship, but the largerarguments of those who would wrench and press the poetry into detailed conformity with controlling pattern are far less persuasive than the views of those others who understand (with Bartlett Giamatti) the need 'to discriminate, to be flexible and tolerant.' The perceptive insight that quickly gives place to willed imposition of pattern carries not much conviction; a more imaginative and generous scholarship allows the poem to have its gentle way, and at length virtually to evoke its own patterned identity. In some measure to relinquish, it appears, is the key to critical control. The most Procrustean of these studies is Donald Bouchard's Milton: A Structural Reading. The structuralist approach to Renaissance poetry evidently can be fruitful, as the work of Paula Johnson makes clear. But, as for any methodology, a certain tact is required: ifBouchard's sweeping generalizations and cavalier way with the texts regularly amaze, they do not everywhere persuade. Carelessly proofread, the book is careless in other ways too. An allusion to something described as a 'two-headed engine' stands dose by a remark that the speaker in Lycidas 'persists in setting himself apart as a " perfect witness of all-judging Jove'" (pp 41, 38). The consequences of the Redcrosse Knight's pride are said to be 'nearly disastrous but for the intervention of King Arthur, symbol of monarchical order and balance' (p 120). The index is hopelessly inadequate: of some twenty-six Canadian, English, and American critics cited in the text (including *Donald F. Bouchard, Milton: A Structural Reading (Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press 1974), 18o, $11.75. PatrickCullen, Infernal Triad: The Flesh , the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1974), xxxvi, 267, $13.50. A. Kent Hieatt, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton: Mythopoeic Continuities and Transformations (Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press 1975), xvii, 292,$20.00. Contemporary Thought on Edmund Spenser, ed Richard C. Frushell and Bernard J. Vondersmith (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern IJiinois University Press 1975), xiii, 240, $15.00. A. Bartlett Giamatti, Play of Double Senses: Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall1975 ), xi, 140,$6.50 cloth, $2.95 paper. UTQ, Volume XLVI, Number 2, Winter 1976/7 178 HUGH MACLEAN two non-persons, George Welkes and Barbara Lewalsky), only six appear in the index. The central figure in Bouchard's carpet appears to combine three emphases: that 'the goal' ofMilton's literary endeavour is 'to become a rational being aware of his roots in the irrational' (p 6); that this poet's art reflects an 'emerging philosophy of the iconoclast' which at length repudiates the 'didactic and nationalistic ... purpose of histories in the Renaissance' together with the reliance on mimetic art (pp 175, 67); and that the expression 'reason is choice' means for Milton primarily the rejection of history ('the corpse of life') and all 'images of human desire' in favour of 'the end of man' postulated in the New Testament and recorded in Paradise Regained (pp 171, 176). There is something to be said for these positions, of course: one has only to recall that dazzling introduction to De doctrina christiana , orthe poignant allusions to unfallen Eden, so long, so far removed away from an English society cramped and fettered by 'gibberish laws.' But Bouchard's arbitrary and narrowly selective methodology turns in his hand. 'Milton's work ... needs to be read side by side with ... the records of the Royal Society, the seventeenth-century exegetical work on the Bible, and the political and religious history of the Revolution. Yet ... [it] can be examined in its own right as an internal and integral development, which assumes his sensitivity...