Rational Delight

Milton has become rather hard to love of late. We have always known him to be self-righteous and prudish, proud and combative, never happier than when there was someone to prove wrong and unlimited paper to do it on, insufferably purist, dogmatic, and prone to irritating assertions about the superiority of men over women. But at the same time, it is has never been difficult to marvel at his sheer personal courage, his pursuit of religious and civil liberty, his astonishing erudition, and the way he could write iambic pentameters like no one before or since. Recently, however, a potent charge has been laid at Milton’s door, and one that remains hard to shake – that he is guilty of the great modern sin of conviction. In the postsecular age, Milton has been repackaged as a zealot, an abettor of religious violence like that of the fanatical biblical hero in Samson Agonistes, a terrorist, or at least hard to disentangle in the end from a terrorist mindset. Critics belonging to the self-styled ‘New Milton Criticism’ have tried to rescue the poet from these characterisations by insisting that Milton did not hold any of his beliefs quite as firmly as one might think. His writings, instead, show a generous lack of certitude in matters of religion and a broad-minded commitment to multiplicity, open-endedness, and interpretative pluralism that should grant him long-term protection under the aegis of indeterminacy. To many, this has seemed like special pleading: we may not like some of Milton’s convictions (though advocacy of religious violence, it must be said, does not appear to have been one of them), but to deny their existence makes Milton’s actions and his poetry a bit nonsensical.

David Quint’s brilliant book Inside Paradise Lost does not engage in special pleading of this kind, and anyone who wishes to fall in love with Milton again will find in its pages the poet of their heart’s longing. Quint’s Milton knows what he means to say and develops a profoundly beautiful poem in which to say it – highly organised, thickly textured, unified in all its polyvalence, and thoroughly successful. This Milton is a thoughtful and benevolent artist who sees complexity everywhere but works to streamline it for his readers into intelligibility and order. Indeed, the poem’s straightforward message, as Quint states in the book’s first sentence with a bit of self-conscious flippancy– is ‘make love, not war’. This claim, ‘more and less familiar’, is advanced through scrupulous, imaginative, and engaging excavations of the literary structures, patterns, and processes by which Milton turns the epic tradition on its head to write a heroic poem that replaces war with love and thereby ends the epic genre altogether. In the book’s final pages, Quint watches Adam and Eve leave Paradise as ‘the gates of epic close behind them’ (p. 248). The world spreading before their eyes will not be the province of epic, but of the humbler, more intimate genre of the novel.

That Quint showily dispenses with his argument in the book’s opening sentence should not deter readers from noticing that there is much here that is new – or, perhaps more accurately but still non-trivially, much that strikes one newly because of the fierce clarity and patient precision of Quint’s prose. It will surprise no one that Milton imagined himself writing against an epic tradition starting from Homer that saw war as the only proper subject for heroic verse, or that he aimed to replace epic’s traditional military heroism with a vision of Christian love. What precisely that love is and how it manifests itself in the poem makes for more eye-catching reading. We find it not, or not merely, in the Son’s charity-driven promise to save humanity with his death, but crucially for Quint, in Adam’s choice of love for Eve over obedience to God. What Quint takes to be...