And Behold, it Was Very Good.

So God created Man in His Own Image, 

in The Image of God created He Him;

Male and Female created He Them.

And God blessed Them, 

and God said unto Them, 

"Be fruitful, and multiply, 

and replenish The Earth, 

and subdue it: 

and have Dominion 

over the fish of the sea, 

and over the fowl of the air, 

and over every living thing 

that moveth upon The Earth."

And God said, 

"Behold, I have given You 

every herb bearing seed, 

which is upon the face of all The Earth, 

and every tree, in the which is 

the fruit of a tree yielding seed; 

to You it shall be for meat.

And to every beast of The Earth, 

and to every fowl of The Air, 

and to every thing that 

creepeth upon The Earth, 

wherein there is Life, 

I have given every green herb 

for meat: and it was so."

And God saw every thing 

that He had made, and, 

Behold, it was Very Good. 

Peterson: You touched on this idea of The Destruction of The Works of Art. 

And one of things I really like about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of ressentiment, of resentment. 

And it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the motive power that drives the postmodernist. . . 

Let’s call it - it’s not a Revolution - Transformation seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything that has any - well, what would you say - any merit of competence or aesthetic quality. 

And I don’t know if that’s. . . It seems to me that that’s partly rooted in the academic’s disdain for The  Business World, which I think is driven by their relative economic inequality. 

Because most people who are as intelligent as academics are, from a pure IQ point of view, make more money in the private sphere, and so I think that drives some of it. 

But there also seems to be this - there’s a destruction, an aim for destruction, of The Aesthetic Quality of the literary or artistic work, its reduction to some kind of Power-Game, and, surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates a Power-Game. 

Which I can’t help but identifying with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator. 

Does that seem reasonable to you? 

Paglia: These professors who allege that art is nothing but an ideological movement by one elite against another group - these people are Philistines. They’re Philistines. 

They’re middlebrow, hopelessly middlebrow. They have no sense of Beauty, they no sense of the aesthetic. Now Marxism does indeed assert this. 

Marxism tries to reconfigure The Universe in terms of Materialism. 

It does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension. Now, I’m an atheist, but I see the great world religions, as enormous works of art, as the best way to understand the universe and man’s place in it. I find them enormously moving. They’re like enormous poems. And what I have called for - the true revolution would have been to make the core curriculum of world education - the world, okay - the great religions of the world. I feel that is the only way to achieve an understanding, and it’s also a way to present the aesthetic. I feel that the real 60s vision was about exultation, elevation, cosmic consciousness. 

All of these things were rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets, who seized onto Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. My career has been in the art schools. My entire career, beginning at Bennington College. So I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of art. It is absolute nonsense, as post-structuralism maintains, that reality is mediated by language, by words. Everything we can know, including gender. It is absolutely madness. Because I’m teaching students whose majors are ceramics or dance, who are jazz musicians, who understand reality in terms of the body and sensory activation. See what happened was, something was going on in the art world as well. I identify with Andy Warhol and pop art. That was what was going on during my years in college. Everything about Andy Warhol was like “Wow!” Admiration. Wow. What happened immediately after that in the arts, 1970s, was this collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism also. This happened in the art world. It was an utter misunderstanding of culture, it seems to me, by that movement in the art world. That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead. What postmodernism is is a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant-garde. 

The avant-garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century. 

We’re talking about Courbet, the realists. We’re talking about Monet and the impressionists. People who have genuinely suffered for their radical ideas and their innovations. Going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollock, who truly suffered for his art. 

It was only after his death that suddenly the market was created for abstract art. Pop art killed the avant-garde. The idea that the avant-garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world, which feels that they must attack, attack, attack. 

Challenge the simplistic beliefs of the hoi polloi. Excuse me. 

From the moment Andy Warhol and embraced the popular media instead of having the opposition to it that serious artists had had, that was the end of oppositional art. So we have been going on now for fifty years. 

The Postmodernism in academe is hand-in-hand with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as important art at galleries everywhere. 

This incredible, incredible mechanism of contemporary art pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative, with this idea once again that The Art World has a superior view of Reality. 

Authentic Leftism is Populist. It is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion, in an openness and [inaudible] of speech. Not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftists of academe, who are frauds. These people who managed to rise to the top at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton - how many of these people are radical? They are career people. They’re corporate types. They love the institutional context. They know how to manipulate the bureaucracy, which has totally invaded and usurped academe everywhere. These people are company players. They could have done well in any field. They love to sit in endless committees. They love bureaucratic regulation and so on. Not one ‘leftist’ in American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people - not one voice to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, absolute fascists bureaucrats. They’re cancerous. 

There are so many of them. The faculty have completely lost any power in American academe. It’s a scandal what has happened. And they deserve the present servitude that they’re in right now, because they never protested. My first job at Bennington College, 1976. I was there when there was an uprising by the faculty, against the encroachment by the board of trustees and the president. It was a huge thing. It was reported on the New York Times. And we pushed that president out. 

And there’s not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees and by the administrations. All these decades. Passive. Slaves, slaves, they deserve their slavery. 

Peterson: Yep. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve thought the same thing about university professors for a long time. They get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no. And the fact that in the United States - it’s not quite as bad in Canada, I wouldn’t say. . . 

But the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension. It seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students’ future earnings. 

And they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control. Something like that. 

So it’s a real bargain with The Devil. 

Paglia: And a total abandonment of any kind of education, actually, in history and culture that has come along with it. The transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu where you can pick this course or that course or this course without any kind of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and chronology, and introduces you to the basics. Because our professors are such prima donnas, they can only teach in their little areas. So we have this total fragmentation. The great art history survey courses are being abandoned steadily. Why? 

Because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives, because we are taught now that narratives are false. 

Peterson: That’s another issue I want to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists. I can’t understand the causal relationship. 

Tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist. So I’m dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise. And there is some danger in that. 

But the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case. 

You can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. 

And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of Reality, then it serves some Other Master. 

And so The Master that it hypothetically serves for The Postmodernists is Nothing but Power, because that seems to be everything they believe in. They don’t believe in competence. They don’t believe in authority. They don’t seem to believe in an objective world, because everything is language-mediated. So it’s an extraordinarily cynical perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical. You can attribute everything to power and dominance. Does that seem like a reasonable summary of the postmodern. . . 

Paglia: Yes, exactly. It’s a radical relativism. Peterson: Okay, it’s a radical relativism. Now, but the strange thing is, despite. . . Okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives. So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Erich Neumann, because of course they’re foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied grand narratives. That’s never touched. 

But then, despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there’s a neo-Marxism that’s tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange identity politics. And I don’t. . . Two things. I don’t understand the causal relationship there. The skeptical part of me things that postmodernism was an intellectual. . . It’s intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever. But I still can’t understand how the postmodernists can make the “no grand narrative” claim, but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions. I don’t understand that. So what do you think about that? 

Paglia: Well I can only speak about literary professors, really, and they seem to me, almost universally in the U.S., to be very naive. 

They seem to know nothing about actual History, political science, or economics.

 It’s simply an attitude. They have an attitude. 

Marxism becomes simply a Badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with. 

Peterson: And generally nothing but contempt for. 

Paglia: Yes, and the thing is that the campus leftists are almost p for their rather snobbish treatment of staff. 

They don’t have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure: the janitors and even the secretaries. There’s a kind of high and mighty aristocracy. These are people who have wandered into the English departments and are products of a time, during the New Criticism, when history and psychology had been excluded. My ambition was. . . I loved the New Criticism as a style of textual analysis. And the New Criticism had multiple interpretations that were possible and that were encouraged. In fact, one of the great projects was Maynard Mack’s series Twentieth Century Views, where you had these books. . . I adored them in college. It was about Jane Austen or about Emily Brontë or about Wordsworth. And they were collections of alternate views of the same thing. The idea that there were no alternate views, and there was no relativistic, situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense. But the point was we needed to restore history to literary study, and we needed to add psychology to it, because there was great animus against Freud. When I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way ‘Freud’ and ‘Freudian’ were used as negative terms in a sneering way by the very WASP professors. Actually, it seemed like we were moving there. The early 1970s was a great period of psycho-biography about political figures. So I thought, ‘It’s happening.’ All of a sudden 7

it all got short-circuited by this arrival of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the 1970s. So I feel I am an old historicist, not a new historicist. I think new historicism is an absolute scam. It’s just a way. . . It’s like tweezers. You pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. You make a little tiny salad, and somehow this atomized thing is supposed to mean something. It’s all, to me, very superficial, very cynical, very distant. I am the product of old historicism, of German philology. My first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology, archeology. Everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme, from antiquity and indeed from the Stone Age. And that is the problem with these people. They’re mal-educated. The postmodernists and academic Marxists are mal-educated, embarrassingly so. They know nothing before the present. Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment. Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which, by the way, he failed to notice. A lot of what he was talking about turns out to be simply the hangover of neoclassicism. This is how ignorant that man was. He was not talented as a researcher. He knew absolutely nothing. He knew nothing about antiquity. How can you make any kind of large structure, large mechanism, to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity? He did not see anything. This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything. Peterson: Maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge, or between different levels of quality of knowledge. I’ve seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the - what would you call it - the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology. It’s one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree. But if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education, because everything becomes the same. And that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance. You know Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lacan, Derrida, Foucault triad. You can read Foucault. I read Madness and Civilization and a couple of his other books, and I thought that they were painfully obvious. The idea that mental disorder is in part a social construct is self-evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training. 8

The real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let’s say, as something that might be purely biological. They have a pure disease model. But nobody who’s a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that. Partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of science, because it’s associated with health, and the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and socio- cultural condition. Everyone knows that. So when I read Madness and Civilization I thought, well that’s not radical, that’s just bloody self-evident. Paglia: Well, you know Foucault’s admirers actually think that he began the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology. Social psychology was well launched in the 1920s. The levels of ignorance that this people who think Foucault is so original have not read Durkheim, they’ve not read Max Weber, they’ve never read Erving Goffman. So in other words, to me everything in Foucault seemed obvious, because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution. Again, I know these people. I, in some cases, knew them in graduate school - people who went on to become these admirers of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. And I know what their training was. Their training was purely within the English department. That’s all they ever knew. They never made any research outside of that. Foucault is simply this mechanism. It’s like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture. But the contortions of language, the deliberate labyrinth of elitist language, at the same time as pretending to be a leftist? This is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced. Peterson: So I got a story to tell you that you might like because I’ve thought a lot about that use of language. Because language can be used as camouflage, and so here’s the story. I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. So he was talking about zebras, and zebras of course have stripes. And hypothetically that’s associated with camouflage. But it’s not a straightforward association because zebras are black and white, and they’re on the veldt along with the lions. The lions are camouflaged because they’re grass colored, but the bloody zebras are black and white. You can see them like 15 miles away. So biologists go out to study zebras, and they’re making notes on a zebra. And they watch it, then they look down at their notes, and then they look up. But they think, ‘Uh oh, I don’t know which zebra I was looking at.’ The camouflage is actually against the herd because a zebra is a herd animal, not an individual. So the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd, so you can’t identify it. So this was a quandary for the biologists, so they did one of two things. One was drive a jeep up to the zebra herd, and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunch of the zebra, or tag it with an ear tag like you use for cattle. The lions would kill it. So as soon 9

as it became identifiable the predators could organize their hunt around that identifiable animal. That’s why there’s the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don’t. They take down the identifiable animals. So that’s the thing: if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators. One of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities, and then they share a language. And the language unites them. As long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn’t anybody in the coterie that’s going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language. It’s group protection strategy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the search for. . . It’s the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system. Paglia: So true. To me it’s blatantly careerist because it was about advancement, and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. This is a special technical language. No one else can understand it. Only we can. But what’s absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, is that these people, these American academics, are imitating the contorted language of translations from the French. When Lacan is translated into English, there’s a contortion there. What he was trying to do in French was to break up the neoclassical formulations that descended from [Jean] Racine. There was something that was going on - there was a sabotage of the French language that was going on - that was necessary in France, not necessary in English. We have this long tradition of poetry going back to Shakespeare and Chaucer. We have our own language, far more vital than the French. Peterson: Oh yeah, the French constrain their language all the time by bureaucracy. Paglia: That’s right. So the amateurism of American academics trying to imitate a translation of Lacan when Lacan is doing something in France - that is absolutely not necessary, and indeed wrong to be doing in English. The utter cynical abandonment of the great tradition of the English department. I felt that the true radicalism was not about adding on other departments, so we have African American studies and Women’s Studies and so on. The true radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure. That’s what I wanted. I feel that was the authentic revolutionary 1960s thing to do: to blend all the literature studies together, 

Post-Modernism

'Giving bullshit a bad name' 

But Foucault also had a disciple: Jacques Derrida , who took his course at the ENS: "I was struck, like many others , by his speaking ability . His eloquence, authority , and brilliance were impressive ," said Derrida later of his mentor. Derrida was taken by Foucault to the psychiatric hospital of St. Anne to hear patients examined (Michel Foucault by Didier Eribon, p. 50). 

Derrida has been less of a political exhibitionist than Foucault. Derrida was arrested by the communist authorities in Prague in 1 981 on charges of drug trafficking; he said that he had come to meet dissidents and was released after protests . In the mid-1980s , Derrida authored a characteristically garbled essay!in praise of Nelson Mandela.

In general , Derrida claims always to have been a leftist . Foucault and his pupil Oerrida quarreled during the 1970s , and Foucault has provi􀄘ed some trenchant summations of Derrida' s work, which he rightly called "terrorist obscurantism . " Obscurantism because Derrida deliberately writes in an incomprehensible 􀄙ay . If one ventures to criticize Derrida, the latter says: "You misunderstood me you are an idiot" (LimitedI nc. , p. 158). roucault also said of Derrida: "He's the kind of philosopher w 0 gives bullshit a bad name" (Illiberal Education by Dinesh D'Souza, p. 190). The main exception seems to be when Derrida has to argue for funding for his activities; in these cases he seems to be able to speak quite clearly (see Tenured Radicals) . The destruction of language Those who try to read Derrida find a smokescreen of infuriating jargon, thoroughly pedantic but in a modish way. What is Derrida up to behind the smokescreen? One thinks of Moliere's pedant Vadius in Les Femmes Savantes . His task at one level is simply to destroy the literate languages of western Europe and their developed capacity to transmit advanced scientific, artistic, and epistemological conceptions.

Derrida wants to wreck everything that has been accomplished since De Vulgari Eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular) by Dante, Petrarch, and their heirs in many countries. Derrida also knows that in order to destroy the efficacy of these languages, he must also destroy the heritage of Plato. Derrida wants to show that all written and spoken discourse is umeadable, undecipherable, incapable of meaning anything. Reading a written text, above all, is for Derrida always a misreading. 

For this operation Derrida proceeds in the spirit of an ultra-Aristotelian radical nominalism which abolishes any relation between language on the one hand, and concepts and reality on the other. Such an outlook is always closely linked with paranoid schizophrenic mental pathologies. The operation is far from new, but has been attempted many times during the centuries, in recent times especially by the AngloVenetian or continental oligarchical schools of philosophy. Derrida is like David Hume, who began with the usual "Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu" ("Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses") of Paolo Sarpi's disciples among the British empiricists, and soon ended up denying the possible existence of truth, the world, causality, knowledge, and the self.

Derrida uses "texts" as the primary sense impressions and arrives at the same kind of radical skepticism. Signs without reality Much of modem philosophy is an attempt to dissolve epistemology into language and then to cripple epistemology by dissolving language. This is typical of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who has had immense influence in the AngloAmerican world. Ernst Cassirer wrote in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms about language becoming the principal weapon of skepticism rather than the vehicle for philosophical knowledge. Stuart Chase and the semanticists tried to show that most important political and historical concepts were meaningless verbiage.

The modem hermeneutic school is not far behind. Derrida's late comrade in arms, Paul de Man, the leading "boa deconstructor" at Yale University until his death in 1984 , talked about the predicament of modem thought as being linguistic rather than ontological or hermeneutic- meaning once again that language is a self-contained world of signs without links to reality. Concepts about the real world are degraded to rhetorical figures and tropes. Derrida's trick is to veil his extreflle subjectivist denial of reality with an apparent negation of both subject and object: " ... not only [does] meaning ... 􀅠ot essentially imply the intuition of the object but ... it essJntially excludes it .. .. The total absence of the subject and) object of a statementthe death of the writer and/or the dis ppearance of the object he was able to describe--does not prevent a text from 'mean- I ing' something. On the contrary, this possibility gives birth to meaning as such, gives it out to be eard and read" (Speech and Phenomena , pp. 92-93). Derrida's irrationalism has more flair than that of his plodding factional adversaries in thi older Anglo-American linguistic analysis schools.

When Derrida was a young boy, he was locked by his sister in a cedar chest in the family home and kept there by her for what seemed to him to be an eternity. During this time the child Derrida thought that he had died and gone to another world. After he had been rescued from the cedar chest, he somehow conceived the idea that he had been castrated. He came to see himself as the Egyptian pagan god Osiris, who had died and been dismembered, but then reassembled and brought back from the dead (minus his male organ) by Isis. 

Derrida told his Paris students of the early 1970s that this decisive experience in his life had led him to write the book Dissemination (Paris, 1972), which includes much elaboration of the theme of seed that is scattered, etc. 

Derrida felt compelled to narrate the Isis-Osiris-Horus myth in detail in the chapter of Dissemination entitled"Plato's Pharmacy," which is otherwise a document of his hatred for both Socrates and Plato. The Kabbala and mysticism Derrida is the bearer of another form of irrationalism of a specifically Venetian stamp: He has been pervasively influenced by the mystical writings of the Kabbala, a school cultivated over centuries by the Luzzato patrician family of the Venetian ghetto. 

Derrida cites a certain "Rabbi Eliezer": "If all the seas were of ink, and all ponds planted with reeds, if the sky and the earth were parchments and if all human beings practiced the art of writing, they would not exhaust the Torah I have learned, just as the Torah itself would not be diminished any more than is the sea by the water removed by a paint brush dipped in it."

Can this be Eleazar Ben Judah of Worms, the Hasidic Kabbalist who lived from 1160 to 1238? An ancient text with rach single word surrounded by . en . dless pages of exegetica􀁑 comm􀅘nt􀅙, with each note pomtmg to a another, older text-this IS one of Derrida's d.ominating visions. 􀁐 errida's lessay . on the Livre des Questions (B ook of QuestIOns) and reBatls Ma Demeure (I Build My House) by the contemporary French author Edmond Jabes yields a singular quotation on "the difficulty of being a Jew, which coincides with the difficulty of writing: for Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same depletion." "The art of the writer consists in little by little making words interest themselves in his books" I (Writing and Difef rence, p. 65􀅚. Derrida sometimes assumes the persona of a Kabbalist and signs his essays as "Reb Rida" or "Reb Derissa." I Derrida was much influen􀅛ed by the French writer Emmanuel Levinas, who populahzed the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the pro-Nazi existentialism of Martin Heidegger in France. Husserl and Heidegger had appeared as co-thinkers until Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, when Heidegger came out openly asia raving Nazi, while Husserl declined to do so. At this point, Levinas gravitated to Heidegger's, that is to say, to the oPfn Nazi side. Levinas helped to direct Derrida' s attention 0 Heidegger, who was also profoundly influencing Frenc􀅜 thought via Sartre, who was also a convinced Heideggerian. Just as Heidegger is a commentator of the protofascist 􀅝ietzsche, so Derrida can be seen as a commentator of the Nazi Heidegger. Derrida's endorsement of Heidegger is iqdeed very strong: "I maintain . . . that Heidegger's text is 0t extreme importance, that it constitutes an unprecedented, lirreversible advance and that we are still very far from haying exploited all its critical resources" (Positions, pp. 70, 3). Deconstruction is destruction A typical theme of the irr􀀚tionalists of the Weimar Republic was Destruktion . Karl ¥annheim wrote in his Ideology and Utopia (1929) about thd need to promote the Destruktion of self-deceiving ideologi s. For the Heidegger of Being and Time , Destruktion meant something similar, approximately the clearing away of what deconstructionists call "western metaphysics" from life and the institutions of thought. Heidegger wrote afteI the war in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (p. 211) of the need for a "destructive retrospect of the history 0 I ontology" whose task would be to "lay bare the internal character or development" of its objects of study. This would i􀅞volve a "loosening up" of the "hardened tradition" of "ontology" by a "positive destruction." The Nazi Heidegger's noti n of Destruktion is the immediate starting point for Derrid􀅟 and his entire school. In the first published edition of De La GrammatoLogie (Of Gramma- I tology) published in Paris in 19f67 , Derrida does not talk about "deconstruction" but rather abfut "destruction" throughout. Derrida says that in deconstruetion, "the task is . . . to dis-mantle [deconstruire] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures which are at work . . . not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way" (Margins of Philosophy). Derrida is nervous to the point of paranoia lest this connection become too obvious: He deliberately lies that "deconstruction has nothing to do with destruction. I believe in the necessity of scientific work in the classical sense. I believe in the necessity of everything which is being done . "

The destruction of reason With deconstruction thus revealed as a slyly disguised form of destruction , the next question is to determine what is to be destroyed. Derrida wants the destruction of reason, the deconstruction of the Logos, which he identifies as the central point of the Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition. That tradition is what the deconstructionists are attacking when they rail against "western metaphysics." Derrida is anti-western because he regards the line of development from Socrates and Plato through Gottfried Leibniz as "ethnocentric" and racist. When he attacks "metaphysics," he means human reason itself.

Derrida writes: "The 'rationality' -but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence-which governs a writing is thus enlarged and radicalized , no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos . Particularly the signification of truth. All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God ' s infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense" (OfGrammatology, pp . 1 0- 1 1 ) .

And again: "This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology: The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God" (OfGrammatology, p. 13). How then can reason and the logos be destroyed?

Heidegger had already given the example of attempt this by mystifying the concepts having to do with language: ''Thinking collects language into simple speaking . Language is therefore the language of being , just as the clouds are the clouds of the heavens . In speaking , thinking plows simple furrows into language . These furrows are even simpler than those plowed with slow steps by the farmer. " 'The death of civilization of the book' For Derrida, using a terminology that is borrowed from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , language is at first the realm of "sign" and "signified . " "The difference between sign and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain . . . the scientific truth . . . without also bringing with it all its metaphysico-theological roots" (Of Grammatology, p. 13).

In other words, Platonic Christianity is the basis for modem science, and that is the enemy Derrida seeks to liquidate by destroying language. The scientific tradition "begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics . " (Here Derrida is probably targeting Georg Cantor and the transfinite numbers.) Derrida is fully conscious that the exhaustion of language will bring with it nothing less than the "death of speech" and the "death of the civilization of the book" (Of Grammatology, p . 8).

Again following his Nazi guru Heidegger, Derrida focuses his destructive attention on the "metaphysics of presence" as this relates to language . The "presence" amounts to a solid grounding for certain knowledge, for the certitude that something exists . Derrida is at pains to point out that "presence" of this kind is required as a pre-condition for the conceptual apparatus of western philosophy from the time of the Greeks on down: "It could be shown that all names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence-eidos [action], arche [principle or first cause], telos [purpose], energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, [truth] transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth" ("Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," pp. 279-280). In language, "the metaphysics of presence" is equated with a "transcendental signified" or "ultimate referent," which would function as the ultimate guarantee of meaning.

We see that for Derrida, all western languages are "metaphysical," since their key words and concepts are permeated by Christian Platonism. They are also metaphysical, he thinks, because the only way to be sure of the meaning of "Send over a pizza," presupposes the Christian Platonic foundations of the whole civilization. Derrida therefore sets out to destroy Platonism by destroying language, while hoping to destroy the civilization along with both. 

Reason and speech Derrida asserts that the western languages are "logocentric," that they are based on reason in this way. Logos can mean reason, but also lawfulness or ordering principle, but also word, discourse, argument, and speech. "With this logos," says Derrida, "the original and essential link to the phone [sound] has never been broken." In other words, human reason and human speech are inextricably bound up together. The connection of speech and reason is the organizing principle of Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St. Augustine to the Italian Renaissance. The theater of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Schiller represents a continuation of this tradition in a slightly different form. We must also recall that the classical poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung aloud.

If "the scar on the paper," were to replace all this, colossal cultural damage would of course be the result. Western language is therefore not only logocentric, but also phonocentric: that is to say, western language recognizes the primacy of the spoken language over the written language.

"The system of language associated with phoneticalphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced" (OfGrammatology, p. 43).

Derrida obviously cannot deny that spoken language "came first." He also cannot escape the fact that while the spoken word (parole) is a sign, the written word (mot) is the sign of a sign. He tries to go back to a mythical form of writing in general that might have existed before Socrates and Plato came on the scene, calling this arche-ecriture , (arch-writing) but this is plainly nothing but a crude deus ex machina hauled in to substantiate a thesis that has nothing going for it.

In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates language under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals and other objects. But Derrida is hell-bent on reducing everything to writing and texts as the only sense data the individual gets from the world. Black marks on white paper In order to attack the logos and reason through the spoken word, Derrida sets against them his notion of writing: l' ecriture . Derrida explains that what he means by writing is "a text already! written, black on white" (Dissemination , p. 203). That means a text already written, black on white. Black marks on white paper, plus excruciating attention to spaces, numbers, margins, paragraphs, typefaces, colophons, copyright notices, plus patterns, groups, repetitions of all of the above and so on in endless fetishism. Since it is probably clear by now that Derrida, posing as the destroyer of western metaphysics, is only spinning out very bad metaphysics in the process, we can feel free to say that Derrida attempts to establish the ontological priority of writing over language and speech. Nothing in the way of proof is offered in favor of this absurd idea: The argument proceeds through a "we say" and ends by lamely hinting that the computer revolution will also help reduce all spoken words to black marks on the page:

"The entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing" (Of Grammatology, p. 9).

This is Derrida's new pseudo-science called "grammatology," which studies the marks (grammata) on the paper. Each gramme or grapheme can be endlessly commented upon. The word comes from a nineteenth-century French dictionary by Littre and has been more recently used by 1.J. Gelb in the title of his book A Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology.! For Derrida, the black marks on the white paper are the only reality, as he very radicallylasserts in Of Grammatology: "The axial proposition of this essay is that there is nothing I outside the text." Since the notion of the "text" has already been expanded to include all language, and since real events are reduced by Derrida to "discdurse" about those events, the deconstructors argue that this islnot as fanatical as it sounds. But the fact remains that for Derrida, the sense data we have are the texts. There is no other perception. Better yet, as he says, "I don't believe that anything like perception exists" I ("Structure, Sign and Play in tpe Discourse of the Human Sciences" in The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of I Man (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 27 ff., "Discussion").

Deconstructing Plato 

Derrida exalts writing over speech, but logocentric-phonocentric western thinking refuses to go along with him. Derrida directs his rage against Plato by "deconstructing" the dialogue Phaedrus . 

The result is the essay "Plato's Pharmacy" which appears in Dissemination . This is classical Derridean obfuscation, playing on the multiple meanings of the Greek word pharmakon, which can mean variously poison,remedy, magic potion, or medicine. 

But the fields of meaning are even more complicated: Socrates, at the beginning of the dialogue, recounts the story of the nymph Orithyia who was playing with the nymph Pharmakeia when Orithyia was blown over a cliff by Boreas, the north wind. 

Pharmakeia was herself associated with a healing fountain. 

Phaedrus has brought some written texts for Socrates to read, and these are compared to a drug (pharmakon) which has lured Socratesto 

Are these texts a healing drug or poison? 

Socrates narrates the fable of the Egyptian god Tlileuth, a Hermes-Mercury figure who had invented counting, geometry, astronomy, dice, and letters (grammata) for writing. Theuth wants to share all these arts with the people of Egypt, so he goes to Amon Ra (Thamus) and offers the l to him. Amon Ra rejects the letters, explaining that these will weaken memory and make available only the appearance and presumption of knowledge, but not true knowledge. Derrida explodes with rage against Socrates and Plato: ('One begins by repeating without knowing-through a myth-the definition of writing: repeating without knowing .. 1 .. Once the myth has dealt the first blows, the logos of socr􀀋es will crush the accused." (Dissemination. p. 84)

He the proceeds to an obsessive recounting of the Isis-Osiris story. Derrida also makes much of the fact that although Plato includes reference to Socrates as pharmakeus (poisoner, medicine man , sorcerer), he does not free-associate from pharmakon/pharmakeus to pharmakos, meaning scapegoat. The idea is that Socrates really became a scapegoat at his trial, while Plato is making a scapegoat of "writing ." The conclusion is that "the pharmakon is neither the cure nor the poison, neither good nor evil , neither the inside nor the outside , neither speech nor writing" (Positions, p. 59). Through a hidden pattern of ambiguities , the text, in addition to saying what Plato might have meant, also says what Plato cannot have meant. 

The dialogue thus deconstructed is hopelessly contradictory and impossible to interpret or construe. 

LET

“Just let a woman be The Most Crucial Modern Author!”

But it isn’t TRUE.

let (v.)

Old English lætan (Northumbrian leta) "to allow; to leave behind, depart from; leave undone; bequeath," also "to rent, put to rent or hire" (class VII strong verb; past tense let, leort, past participle gelæten), from Proto-Germanic *letan (source also of Old Saxon latan, Old Frisian leta, Dutch laten, Old High German lazan, German lassen, Gothic letan "to leave, let"), from PIE *led-, extended form of root *‌‌lē- "to let go, slacken." If that derivation is correct, the etymological sense would be "let go through weariness, neglect."

 

"The shortening of the root vowel ... has not been satisfactorily explained" [OED]. Of blood, from late Old English. Other Old and Middle English senses include "regard as, consider; behave toward; allow to escape; pretend;" to let (someone) know and to let fly (arrows, etc.) preserve the otherwise obsolete sense of "to cause to." To let (someone) off "allow to go unpunished, excuse from service" is from 1814. To let on is from 1725 as "allow (something) to be known, betray one's knowledge of," 1822 as "pretend" (OED finds a similar use in the phrase never let it on him in a letter from 1637). To let out is late 12c. as "allow to depart" (transitive); intransitive use "be concluded," of schools, meetings, etc., is from 1888, considered by Century Dictionary (1895) to be "Rural, U.S." Of garments, etc., late 14c.

Let alone "abstain from interfering with" is in Old English; the phrase in the sense "not to mention, to say nothing of" is from 1812. To let (something) be "leave it alone" is from c. 1300; let it be "let it pass, leave it alone" is from early 14c. To let go is from c. 1300 as "allow to escape," 1520s as "cease to restrain," 1530s as "dismiss from one's thoughts." Let it go "let it pass, no matter" is as old as Chaucer's Wife of Bath: "But age allas Hath me biraft my beautee Lat it go, far wel, the deuel go ther with!" [c. 1395]. Let me see "show me" is from c. 1300.

let (n.)

"stoppage, obstruction" (obsolete unless in legal contracts), late 12c., from archaic verb letten "to hinder," from Old English lettan "hinder, delay, impede," etymologically "make late," from Proto-Germanic *latjan (source also of Old Saxon lettian "to hinder," Old Norse letja "to hold back," Old High German lezzen "to stop, check," Gothic latjan "to hinder, make late"), related to *lata-, source of late (adj.), from PIE root *‌‌lē- "to let go, slacken."

Auto-Interliniation

​

Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos'd at several times.

On the morning of Christs Nativity. Compos'd 1629.

I.

THis is the Month, and this the happy morn 

Wherin the Son of Heav'ns eternal King, 

Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born, 

Our great redemption from above did bring; 

For so the holy sages once did sing. 

⁠That he our deadly forfeit should release, 

And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

II.

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable, 

And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty, 

Wherwith he wont at Heav'ns high Councel-Table, 

To fit the midst of Trinal Unity, 

He laid aside; and here with us to be, 

⁠Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day, 

And chose with us a darksom House of mortal Clay.

​

III.

Say Heav'nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein

Afford a present to the Infant God?

Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,

To welcom him to this his new abode,

Now while the Heav'n, by the Suns team untrod,

⁠Hath took no print of the approaching light,

And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?

IV.

See how from far upon the Eastern rode

The star-led Wizards haste with odours sweet:

O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,

And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;

Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,

⁠And join thy voice unto the Angel Quire,

From out his secret Altar touch'd with hallow'd fire.

The Hymn.

I.

IT was the Winter wilde,

While the Heav'n-born childe,

⁠All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;

Nature in aw to him

​

Had doff'd her gaudy trim,

⁠With her great Master so to sympathize:

It was no season then for her

To wanton with the Sun, her lusty Paramour.

II.

Onely with speeches fair

She woo's the gentle Air

⁠To hide her guilty front with innocent Snow,

And on her naked shame,

Pollute with sinful blame,

⁠The saintly veil of maiden white to throw,

Confounded, that her Maker's eyes

Should look so near upon her foul deformities.

III.

But he, her fears to cease,

Sent down the meek-ey'd Peace:

⁠She crown'd with olive green, came softly sliding

Down through the turning sphere

His ready Harbinger,

⁠With Turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,

And waving wide her myrtle wand,

She strikes a universal peace through Sea and Land.

IV.

No War or Battleils sound

Was heard the World around:

​

⁠The idle spear and shield were high up hung;

The hooked Chariot stood

Unstain'd with hostile blood,

⁠The Trumpet spake not to the armed throng,

And Kings sate still with awful eye,

As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

V.

But peaceful was the night

Wherein the Prince of light

⁠His reign of peace upon the earth began:

The Windes with wonder whist,

Smoothly the waters kist,

⁠Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,

Who now hath quite forgot to rave,

While birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.

VI.

The Stars with deep amaze

Stand fixt in steadfast gaze,

⁠Bending one way their precious influence,

And will not take their flight,

For all the morning light,

⁠Or Lucifer that often warn'd them thence;

But in their glimmering Orbs did glow,

Until their Lord himself bespake, and bid them go.

​

VII.

And though the shady gloom

Had given day her room,

⁠The Sun himself withheld his wonted speed,

And hid his head for shame,

As his inferior flame,

⁠The new-enlighten'd world no more should need,

He saw a greater Sun appear

Than his bright Throne, or burning Axletree could bear.

VIII.

The Shepherds on the Lawn,

Or ere the point of dawn,

⁠Sate simply chatting in a rustic row;

Full little thought they than,

That the mighty Pan

⁠Was kindly come to live with them below:

Perhaps their loves, or els their sheep,

Was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep.

IX.

When such music sweet

Their hearts and ears did greet,

⁠As never was by mortal finger strook,

Divinely warbled voice

Answering the stringed noise,

⁠As all their souls in blissful rapture took:

​

The air such pleasure loth to lose,

With thousand echoes still prolongs each heav'nly close.

X.

Nature, that heard such sound

Beneath the hollow round

⁠Of Cynthia's seat, the Airy region thrilling,

Now was almost won

To think her part was don,

⁠And that her reign had here its last fulfilling;

She knew such harmony alone

Could hold all Heav'n and Earth in happier union.

XI.

At last surrounds their sight

A Globe of circular light,

⁠That with long beams the shame-fac't Night array'd;

The helmed Cherubim

And sworded Seraphim,

⁠Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displaid,

Harping in loud and solemn quire,

With unexpressive notes to Heav'n's new-born Heir.

XII.

Such Music (as 'tis said)

Before was never made,

⁠But when of old the sons of morning sung,

While the Creator Great

​

His constellations set,

⁠And the well-balanc't world on hinges hung,

And cast the dark foundations deep,

And bid the weltring waves their oozy channel keep.

XIII.

Ring out ye Crystal spheres,

Once bless our human ears,

⁠(If ye have power to touch our senses so)

And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time,

⁠And let the Base of Heav'n's deep Organ blow;

And with your ninefold harmony

Make up full consort to th'Angelic symphony.

XIV.

For if such holy Song

Enwrap our fancy long,

⁠Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,

And speckl'd vanity

Will sicken soon and die,

⁠And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,

And Hell itself will pass away,

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

XV.

Yea, Truth and Justice then

Will down return to men,

​

⁠Th' enameld Arras of the Rainbow wearing,

And Mercy set between,

Thron'd in Celestiall sheen,

⁠With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing,

And Heav'n as at som festivall,

Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

XVI.

But wisest Fate sayes no,

This must not yet be so,

⁠The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy,

That on the bitter cross

Must redeem our loss;

⁠So both himself and us to glorifie:

Yet first to those ychain'd in sleep,

The wakefull trump of doom must thunder through the deep,

XVII.

With such a horrid clang

As on mount Sinai rang

⁠While the red fire, and smouldring clouds out brake:

The aged Earth agast

With terrour of that blast,

⁠Shall from the surface to the center shake;

When at the worlds last session,

The dreadfull Judge in middle Air shall spread his throne.

​

XVIII.

And then at last our bliss

Full and perfect is,

⁠But now begins; for from this happy day

Th' old Dragon under ground,

In straiter limits bound,

⁠Not half so far casts his usurped sway,

And wrath to see his Kingdom fail,

Swindges the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail.

XIX.

The Oracles are dumm,

No voice or hideous humm

⁠Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.

Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

⁠With hollow shreik the steep of Delphos leaving.

No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspire's the pale-ey'd Priest from the prophetic cell.

XX.

The lonely mountains o're,

And the resounding shore,

⁠A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;

From haunted spring and dale

Edg'd with poplar pale,

⁠The parting Genius is with sighing sent,

​

With flowre-inwov'n tresses torn

The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

XXI.

In consecrated Earth,

And on the holy Hearth,

⁠The Lars, and Lemures moan with midnight plaint,

In Urns, and Altars round,

A drear, and dying sound

⁠Affrights the Flamins at their service quaint;

And the chill Marble seems to sweat,

While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat.

XXII.

Peor, and Baalim,

Forsake their Temples dim,

⁠With that twise-batter'd god of Palestine,

And mooned Ashtaroth,

Heav'ns Queen and Mother both,

⁠Now sits not girt with Tapers holy shine,

The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn,

In vain the Tyrian Maids their wounded Thamuz mourn.

XXIII.

And sullen Moloch fled,

Hath left in shadows dred,

⁠His burning Idol all of blackest hue,

In vain with Cymbals ring,

​

They call the grisly king,

⁠In dismall dance about the furnace blue,

The brutish gods of Nile as fast,

Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis hast.

XXIV.

Nor is Osiris seen

In Memphian Grove, or Green,

⁠Trampling the unshowr'd Grasse with lowings loud:

Nor can he be at rest

Within his sacred chest,

⁠Naught but profoundest Hell can be his shroud,

In vain with Timbrel'd Anthems dark

The sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt Ark.

XXV.

He feels from Juda's land

The dredded Infants hand,

⁠The rayes of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;

Nor all the gods beside,

Longer dare abide,

⁠Nor Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:

Our Babe, to shew his Godhead true,

Can in his swadling bands controul the damned crew.

XXVI.

So when the Sun in bed,

Curtain'd with cloudy red,

​

⁠Pillows his chin upon an Orient wave.

The flocking shadows pale

Troop to th' infernall jail,

⁠Each fetter'd Ghost slips to his severall grave,

And the yellow-skirted Fayes,

Fly after the Night-steeds, leaving their Moon-lov'd maze.

XXVII.

But see the Virgin blest,

Hath laid her Babe to rest.

⁠Time is our tedious Song should here have ending,

Heav'ns youngest-teemed Star

Hath fixt her polisht Car,

⁠Her sleeping Lord with Handmaid Lamp attending.

And all about the Courtly Stable,

Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable.

2. The Infant Cry of God 

Milton's early ode, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (1629) is presented and discussed. 

The author's preoccupation with his standing as a novice poet and his early ambitions, as carefully outlined in the letter to Charles Diodati, are examined. 

The ode's subject matter, other poets' treatment of the Nativity, and Milton's peculiar contributions to the micro-genre are discussed, including his curious temporal choices, the competitive attitude of his narrator, and the mingling of Christian and classical elements. 


The rejection of the pagan world in the poem's final stanzas is explicated and underscored as an issue that will recur throughout the corpus.

Additional reading assignments for this class meeting include "At a Vacation Exercise in the College" (1628), "On the Death of a Fair Infant" (1628), and "Elegia sexta" (1629). 

00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction: The Nativity Ode 

05:10 - Chapter 2. Milton on Poetry as a Divine Vocation 

16:02 - Chapter 3. The Poetic Celebration of the Birth of Christ 

18:43 - Chapter 4. Nativity Ode: The Prelude 

30:59 - Chapter 5. Nativity Ode: The Hymn 



ENGL 220 - Lecture 2 - The Infant Cry of God

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Nativity Ode [00:00:00]

Professor John Rogers: It’s fitting that the first poem of Milton’s that we study in this class is “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” In a number of ways, it’s both a first poem and it’s a poem about firsts. It isn’t exactly, though, the first poem that Milton wrote. As you can see from your – from actually any – edition, any modern edition, of Milton which arranges the poems more or less chronologically – you can tell that the young Milton had actually written quite a few things before he wrote what we call colloquially the Nativity Ode, but most of these early pieces are written in the Latin that Milton had perfected at school and these earliest of Milton’s Latin poems are lyrics. They’re of an incredibly impressive technical proficiency and they are absolutely soaked with the references to the classical writers that Milton had been ingesting from his earliest youth. Milton had also written a couple of very short poems in English. But there’s an important and, I think, a very real sense in which Milton wanted to make it seem as if the Nativity Ode were the first poem that he had written. There’s also an important and, I think, a very real sense in which Milton wanted to make it seem – and obviously this is a much more difficult feat – wanted to make it seem as if the Nativity Ode were the first poem that anyone had written.

Now Milton was born in 1608 and he wrote the Nativity Ode along with the Sixth Elegy, the Elegia Sexta, that we read for today in December of 1629, a couple of weeks presumably after he turned twenty-one. It wasn’t until 1645 at the age of thirty-six or thirty-seven that Milton would publish his first volume of poems, which he titled simply Poems. And it wouldn’t be another twenty-two years after that until Milton actually published Paradise Lost. Now I am mentioning these dates here because the dates on which Milton wrote and published his poems, the temporal sequence of these publications, have a peculiar and particular importance for the poet. As early as 1629 (that’s the date we’re in now) Milton is thinking of himself as a poet who has not yet published. He delays for an unusually long time his poetic entrance into print, and he’s musing almost continually on what it means to be a poet who has delayed his publication: to be a poet who’s waiting for something, to be a poet who’s always looking to the future to the poem that he hasn’t yet written, to the future and to the readers he hasn’t yet attained, and maybe most gloriously, a poet who’s looking to the future to the fame that he has not yet successfully secured or secured at all because no one at this point knows John Milton.

When in 1645 Milton finally publishes that first volume of poetry, the first poem that he places in this volume is the Nativity Ode, our poem today. And under this title, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” appears – as you can see from your text – appears the subtitle, “composed 1629.” Milton’s taking pains here, and he does this with very few other poems, to let us know precisely when it is that he’s written it. “Composed 1629” – whether or not that’s actually true, and there’s some controversy about that – but nonetheless, the subtitle announces to all who know John Milton that the poet was twenty-one years old at the moment of its composition and that he had therefore just reached his majority.

Now the subject matter that he’s chosen for this poem, for this so-called first poem, couldn’t possibly be more appropriate. With this first poem treating the subject of the nativity of Christ, Milton is able implicitly to announce something like his own nativity as a poet. It goes without saying that there is something outlandish, to say the least, about this. We’re struck by the arrogance implicit in Milton’s active identification here. What could possibly be more presumptuous than the association of the beginning of one’s own career, one’s own literary career, with the birth of the Christian messiah? Milton’s implicit connection between his own birth as a poet and the birth of the Son of God is an act of hubris that I think a lot of his contemporaries would feel more comfortable actually calling blasphemy.
Chapter 2. Milton on Poetry as a Divine Vocation [00:05:10]

John Milton will remain unique in English letters for the degree of thought that he gave to the shape of his literary career, or actually to the notion of a career at all. No English poet before Milton ever suggested that he had been chosen by God at birth to be a poet. None of England’s pre-Miltonic poets – Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare –had dared to suggest – and it would never have occurred to them to suggest –that theirs was actually a divine vocation. I think it takes your breath away to think of the unspeakably high hopes that John Milton had for his career.

If you have a chance, you might want to take a look – I think this is in the Cross Campus Library [a Yale library] – at the facsimile version of the very first edition of Paradise Lost. It’s in ten books rather than twelve. It’s a modest thing, the 1667 volume, and the text looks perfectly ordinary until you realize that in the margin alongside the lines of the poem are printed the line numbers for the poem. just like the line numbers in any modern edition of Milton that’s been produced for the likes of you, for the consumption of college English majors. As far as I know – I know of no exception, although someone may well be able to produce one – no original poem in English had ever been published with line numbers in the margin in its very first printing. And it may well be that no poem has ever been since Paradise Lost published with line numbers in its very first edition. Any right-thinking printer or any right-thinking publisher would scoff at the presumption of a poet who demanded such a thing. The only precedent Milton would have had even for the idea of line numbers would have been the great ancient classics, the magnificent Renaissance editions of Homer and Virgil. They would have appeared in the seventeenth century with line numbers because line numbers obviously facilitate the production of scholarly commentary and facilitate the study of those texts in the classroom. And I can only assume that that is precisely the point, that Milton would – later in 1667 when Paradise Lost is published, he would make his poem canonical just like The Iliad and just like The Odyssey and The Aeneid before anyone had actually read it. Milton would insert into the printed text of his poem his own anticipation that his epic would receive the same universal approbation as Homer’s and Virgil’s. It’s a daring way to jump-start one’s own literary celebrity.

Milton was continually in a state of anticipation. And it’s this rhetoric of anticipation, this language of looking forward, that structures all of Milton’s own narratives about his own literary career. And this is exquisitely visible to us in the Nativity Ode. At a very early age, Milton brooded on his poetic vocation as if it were an actual calling from God. But the problem of one’s being called to be a great poet is that one may have an inkling or some sense of a promise of future greatness but nothing really to show for it yet. And he knew this. He had obviously been a successful student at St. Paul’s School in London and then later in college at Cambridge University. He had written a large handful of college exercises and assignments in Latin, and he had obviously made a favorable impression on his teachers, one of whom, at least, he stayed in touch with for years. Even when he was a young boy Milton’s Latin seems to have been impeccable, and he was quickly establishing himself as one of the best Latinists in the country. But Milton’s calling – this is what John Milton knew – his calling was to be a famous English poet, a famous English poet writing in English: a calling that he holds despite the fact that he appears to have written next to nothing in English verse. All Milton has at the beginning of his poetic career is the promise of greatness, the anticipation of a luminous body of English poetry.

Now in the first original poem that Milton wrote in English, titled “At a Vacation Exercise,” Milton – and you will come to recognize this as so unbelievably Miltonic – Milton doesn’t write about love or about death or about any of the subjects that typically engage the youngest practitioners of poetry. Milton’s subject in his first English poem is – we can guess it: it’s his future literary career. You can look at page thirty-one in the Hughes edition. So Milton begins by addressing not a fair mistress or a blooming rose or – he doesn’t even begin by addressing God. He addresses instead the English language: “Hail native Language,” Milton begins, and then he proceeds to set out in his heroic couplets of iambic pentameter a map for his future career as a famous poet.

Now when Milton publishes this poem, he makes it clear that it was written at age nineteen. That’s important to him. Milton claims that he will one day use the English language to express what he calls “some graver subject,” some more important subject matter, and he proceeds to characterize what that graver subject will look like. I’m looking at line thirty-three here.

    Such where the deep transported mind may soar
    Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’n’s door
    Look in, and see each blissful Deity
    How he before the thunderous throne doth lie…

Now the graver subject that Milton is intending at some point to expound upon is clearly an epic one. Like Homer and like Virgil, Milton intends to soar above the wheeling poles of the visible world and describe the otherwise invisible comings and goings of the gods. And, of course, this is what he would go on to do in Paradise Lost. The nineteen-year-old Milton hasn’t yet imagined that his own epic would take for its subject a story from the Bible, but the poetic ambition is clearly identifiable to us as epic in scope.

We will hear again of Milton’s intention to write an epic in a versified letter that he writes to his best friend, Charles Diodati. This is the letter to Diodati which Milton publishes as the Sixth Elegy. That’s the Latin poem that was assigned for today’s class. So take a look at page fifty-two in the Hughes. Milton naturally wrote his friend letters in impeccable Latin verse, and this one he seems to have composed almost immediately after having written, having completed, the Nativity Ode. The letter to Diodati gives us another glimpse of the anticipatory narrative that Milton is sketching for his career. Milton claims that epic poetry is the highest ambition for a poet and then he goes on to explain how it is that the epic poet should comport himself. I love this. So this is Milton to his best friend:

But he whose [imagine receiving a letter like this!] theme is wars and heaven under Jupiter in his prime, and pious heroes and chieftains half-divine [I’ll skip a little bit]… let him live sparingly like the Samian teacher; and let herbs furnish his innocent diet… and let him drink sober draughts from the pure spring. Beyond this, his youth [the youth of the future epic poet] must be innocent of crime and chaste, his conduct irreproachable and his hands stainless.

So Milton is explaining to Charles Diodati that if you’re going to become an epic poet, you have to start acting like one. You have to remain celibate and, as we will see in the coming week, this is important to Milton. You have to remain sober, and you must eat vegetarian (“let herbs furnish his innocent diet”). And then Milton goes on to explain that this is exactly what Homer did. This is how Homer prepared himself to be the greatest and the first of all epic poets. It’s not uninteresting, I think, to note that there appears to be absolutely no evidence whatsoever available to John Milton that Homer was either vegetarian or a lifelong celibate. By all accounts, Milton has just made this up in his letter to Diodati. Clearly, this is something that he wants to believe or that he needs to believe, but there does seem to be evidence that at least at this early point in Milton’s life he’s intending to remain sexually abstinent forever. He would remain a virgin in order to prepare for and to maintain this incredibly important role as an epic poet. And, as I mentioned a moment ago, we will return to this question of what has been interestingly called the young Milton’s “chastity fetish.”

So Milton implies to Diodati that he isn’t yet up to the task of epic, but as he describes the Nativity Ode that he’s just written, it’s almost as if he considers it something of a mini-epic. This is page 198 in the Hughes: “I am singing the starry sky and the hosts that sang high in air, and the gods that were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines.”

Now we have the trappings here of epic grandeur and epic subject matter. The poem on the morning of Christ’s nativity serves as Milton’s preparation for something greater than itself. It’s a poem on which this very young poet is cutting his teeth.
Chapter 3. The Poetic Celebration of the Birth of Christ [00:16:02]

The nativity of Christ, as you can imagine, was a popular subject for early seventeenth-century poets – for pious early seventeenth-century poets. Nearly all of the poets that we come now to recognize as the major religious literary figures of the period like John Donne, whom you may have read in English 125, or Robert Herrick or Richard Crashaw – all of these poets had tried their hand at the poetic celebration of the birth of Christ. And actually it’s instructive. You can learn a lot by comparing Milton’s poem to those of so many of his contemporaries. His contemporaries are doing a kind of thing with their representation of the birth of Christ that Milton seems carefully to have avoided. And you can actually imagine without even having read them what a lot of these poems are like. Most poets who write nativity poems are interested in the miracle of the virgin birth, emphasizing the Virgin Mary and the tender mother-son relationship between Mary and Jesus.

Milton shows unusually little interest in the miraculousness of the conception or anything like the domestic details of the manger scene. The focus of the Nativity Ode isn’t even really on the Incarnation – that’s the theological doctrine of divinity’s descent into humanity, how God becomes a mortal. What Milton is primarily interested in in his Nativity Ode is the redemption, the promise of what Christ’s Nativity will do at some future point for mankind. The birth of Jesus doesn’t immediately effect the redemption of fallen man but it’s the moment – and this is why it’s so important to Milton – it’s the moment at which that promise is made. The Nativity for Milton is purely an anticipatory event. It’s less meaningful in itself than it is for what it promises for the future, because it’s not going to be until after the Nativity that we have the event of the Crucifixion, and after that the event of the Resurrection, and finally the terrible moment of the Last Judgment which will bring the narrative of Christian history to its ultimate close. So the satisfactions of the moment are for Milton deferred here; and it’s something like a recognizable process of deferral and postponement that you will see beginning to form themselves at the very center of Milton’s poetic imagination.
Chapter 4. Nativity Ode: The Prelude [00:18:43]

Okay. Let’s look at the poem on page forty-three in the Hughes. As soon as Milton describes for us the events in heaven that lead up to the Nativity, he begins the – this is the prelude of the poem, it’s broken up in to two chunks: the prelude and then what Milton calls the hymn – he begins the third stanza of the prelude to his poem with a plea to the Heavenly Muse for inspiration. This is line fifteen, page forty-three in the Hughes. The poet is asking for help with the composition of the poem.

    Say Heav’nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
    Afford a present to the Infant God?
    Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
    To welcome Him to this, his new abode…?

We’re struck, I think – or at least I’m struck – by what I find to be the oddly negative, almost scolding tone that Milton is adopting, really quite inappropriately, I think, in this address to the muse. He seems less interested in actually praying for divine assistance than he is in chiding the muse for not having come to his aid sooner.

We might be able to understand some of the weird, anxious energy behind this stanza if we think of the phrase that Milton uses here: the phrase “Infant God.” As someone who would quickly establish himself as the most talented Latinist probably in all of England, Milton is naturally – how could he not be? – highly attuned to the etymological prehistory of the English word infant. Our word infancy comes from the Latin word infans, which literally means “not speaking.” Christ, whose Nativity Milton is honoring, is still just a baby. He isn’t speaking at this moment yet. He isn’t yet producing language. And in his role here as a mute, as an infant, Christ is serving, I think, an important function for Milton. He serves as something like a complicated double for the young, unpublished, and as of yet unproductive poet himself. Consider that even this early on in his career, Milton is harboring epic ambitions, as we’ve seen. He is very much an infant in 1629. He isn’t yet able or he hasn’t yet produced epic speech. And I think it’s possible to see that one of the purposes of this poem is precisely to correct that situation. It’s one of the purposes of this poem to allow Milton to grow out of his infancy, to incarnate or to put actually into words the talent that he believes himself to possess.

Now it’s not until the fourth stanza of the prelude that we can fully understand the magnitude of the strange anxieties here. We can’t know exactly – and this is one of the wonderfully unsettling things about this stanza – we can’t know exactly to whom Milton is addressing this stanza. It would appear that Milton has stopped addressing the muse, the Heavenly Muse, and that he has begun addressing himself – although that’s unclear. 

But it may be the case that it’s something like a situation in which over the course of the previous stanza, Milton has actually usurped the role of the muse and has begun providing something like his own inspiration.  

So in the fourth stanza we as readers have no idea where we are or when it is the speaker of the poem imagines himself to be speaking, and it’s at this point that something quite strange happens. Milton tells the muse – or is he telling himself? we don’t know – Milton tells someone to hurry up – think of this – to hurry up with the inspiration of the ode, to hurry up with the inspiration of the ode because Milton can see the Three Wise Men bearing their gifts as they dutifully follow the Star of Bethlehem to the manger.

This may seem to be a perfectly reasonable vision for a poet considering himself to be an inspired poet to have, but there’s something peculiar here. Milton wants to beat the Three Wise Men to the scene. Milton wants to arrive in Bethlehem to hand Christ his poem before the wise men are able to bring their gold and their frankincense and their myrrh. Look at line twenty-two.

    See how from far upon the Eastern road
    The Star-led wizards haste with odors sweet:
    O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
    And lay it lowly at His blessed feet.
Think of what this poem is now asking of us. 

We’re being asked to accept the fiction that Milton is having this very poem laid at the blessed feet of the infant Christ. 

Milton, who is writing at the present moment of December of 1629, is claiming the capacity to arrive at a moment in history that he has already described as a long-completed one. 

Milton tells himself to run, and naturally he would have to run fast indeed in order to arrive at a moment in time that had already occurred before he even set out! 

This weird temporal disjunction is an important part of the poem, and it not only gives the poem its peculiar air of something like a conceptual time-warp, but it’s an important part of Milton’s profoundly anticipatory imagination.

So Milton is struggling here to catch up with the star-led wizards, who – as you can note – are already themselves hasting. And he tries to “prevent” them with his humble ode. We’ll talk about humble in a minute, but I’m interested now in the word prevent, which for me is really the central word of this remarkable stanza. Now, I don’t know if Merritt Hughes weighs in on this or not. 

Most editors of Milton tell us that the word prevent in this line retains its original Latin meaning as you can see on your handout. It means “to come before.” The Latin is praevenire; it means “to anticipate.” 

Milton wants his ode to make it to Bethlehem before the Three Wise Men do. 

Now, this is a form of competitiveness with which we are all familiar. 

This is the straightforward, perfectly understandable competition to be first.

Now, it’s Milton’s annotators who tell us that the word prevent means “to come before, to anticipate,” and on some level it obviously means that and that goes without question. But I think this definition is also limiting, and this is a phenomenon that I hope you will come to be familiar with. The good scholars of Milton reveal their typical resistance to anything even remotely interesting or alive in the text. Surely this word prevent also has a little bit of its modern meaning. I think it might actually be the more obvious meaning, which is “to hinder” or “to preclude.” When Milton tells himself to “prevent” the “Star-led wizards… with thy humble ode,” he’s also saying that the wise men should be prevented from making it to the manger at all, that somehow the wise men need to be headed off at the pass and precluded from presenting any gifts to the Infant God that may compete with the so-called humble ode of John Milton.

Now this is a darker form of competitiveness, a competitiveness spawned – think of our own environment here in the academy – spawned by courses that grade strictly on a curve: a type of environment where one succeeds not merely by doing well but by doing better than other people, and especially in addition by preventing other people from doing well. It’s an extraordinarily dark way to characterize the composition and the process of the poem.

We have a strained image of the composition of the poem at its very outset and we have an image of someone writing as if he were participating in a race. And we’re reminded of the etymological root of our modern English word career. Milton will only use the word career once in his poetic oeuvre and it comes – it will come pretty soon, actually, in Sonnet Number Seven. The word career comes from the French carrière, which means “a race course” and etymologically “a career.” What we think of as a career isn’t simply the benign product of the gradual development of a certain potential. That’s how we generally think of a career. It’s the outcome of a race – one’s running faster than all of the other guys – and it’s as if to have a career at all one has no choice but to come in first.

The desire to be first is really central to this poem and it continues in this stanza:

    Have thou the honor first thy Lord to greet
    And join thy voice unto the Angel Choir,
    From out his secret Altar toucht with hallow’d fire.

As you may have guessed, because you have this on your handout, Milton is alluding here to the famous words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Isaiah in this passage is describing a crucial moment in his career, his career as a prophet: the moment in which his lips are cleansed and he is empowered – divinely empowered – to speak prophetically. These are the Old Testament lines:

    Then flew one of the seraphims unto me [Isaiah tells us], having a live coal in his hand
    which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar:

    And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is
    taken away, and thy sin purged.

    Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?
    Then said I, Here am I; send me.

So what are we to do with this allusion? What are we to make of Milton’s use of this striking and painful image of prophetic preparation? Milton can join his voice to the angel choir and have the honor of being first to greet the “Infant God.” But before he can actually be made present at the actual event of the Nativity, he has to endure something painful and obviously momentous: “from out his secret Altar toucht with hallow’d fire.” The iniquity of his lips must be burned off by a live angelic coal, that the sinfulness of his lips – we could think of it as the sinfulness of his voice, his poetic voice – will have to be purged. What exactly that purgation will entail and why Milton’s voice needs to be purged at all – I think these questions are really the subject of the entire rest of the poem. The hymn, what Milton calls the “humble ode,” that follows this introduction is the poem that Milton wants to present to the Lord. But the hymn at the same time is something like the process, the process by which Milton is attempting to purge and cleanse his poetic voice and make it a voice that will actually be equal to the extraordinary ambition that he has for it.
Chapter 5. Nativity Ode: The Hymn [00:30:59]

The hymn, the large part of the poem, can be divided roughly into three sections. First, in the first eight stanzas you have Milton describing the scene of the Nativity and the effect that the birth of this new infant has on the natural world. I don’t have time here to discuss this section right now, but you’ve already had some encounter with the incredibly impressive level of ingenuity and grotesquery in this remarkable passage. Nature, who is an effeminized, personified being, is shamed and humiliated when she finds herself naked in the presence of this new God, Jesus.

The second section runs from stanzas nine through seventeen, and it characterizes the song that the heavenly choir sings at the moment of the Nativity. But when Milton describes the song of the angelic choir he can’t – it’s amazing – he can’t seem to focus on the event at hand. What we should, I think, be witnessing here is the nativity of Christ and all of the events immediately surrounding the actual birth of the Infant God; but no sooner has Milton mentioned the singing of the angelic choir at the Nativity than he reminds himself of all the other times that they’ve sung. It’s something like liner notes or a performance history of the cosmos’ greatest singing group ever.

Look at line 120. Milton writes that this choir had been singing at the moment of creation. Not bad.

    While the Creator Great
    His constellations set,
    And the well-balanc’t world on hinges hung…

It’s almost too much for this poet. He’s already been playing around with the temporality of the poem. as we’ve seen, establishing a fiction that works to place himself at the scene of a nativity that obviously occurs 1600 years and change before his own birth. But it’s almost as if Milton were tempted now to make himself go even further back, to write a humble ode that he could place at the feet of the Creator, the Creator at the moment of the actual creation of the entire universe. The stakes of coming first seem are getting higher and higher.

Before long the speaker realizes that this fantasy (and it is a fantasy that he’s been engaged in) is starting to sound a little extreme or maybe a little dangerous. In line 134, Milton indicates that this holy song has enwrapped his fancy, that it has in some perilous way absorbed his imagination:

    For if such holy Song
    Enwrap our fancy long,
    Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
    And speckl’d vanity
    Will sicken soon and die,
    And leprous sin will melt from earthly mold,
    And hell itself will pass away,
    And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

The holy song Milton has been describing is beginning to look almost too tempting even to contemplate. There’s almost a danger here in listening to it too long or describing it in too much detail and the danger seems – or what Milton thinks of as the peril seems to involve the problem of time. “For if such holy Song / enwrap our fancy long,” then we’ll mistakenly convince ourselves that time could actually run backwards and that we’ve been returned to the Golden Age, the very first age of human history according to classical legend.

We, of course, know as we read the prelude to this poem that this is a work consumed with questions of temporal disjunction, with that problem of temporal discontinuity. Milton clearly wants us to know that this Nativity Ode was written by a young Londoner in 1629, but it’s a poem that is at the same time deliverable to the infant Christ by some extraordinary violation, of course, of all of the established laws of temporal sequence. And when you reread this poem and you look at it in your discussion section, you may want to think about the tenses – it sounds tedious but I am convinced that it’s not tedious – the tenses of the verbs that Milton’s using. Milton is switching here from present to past to future incredibly rapidly and really with a bewildering kind of facility And it is at some point impossible, I think, for the reader to tell whether the poet is discussing something that’s happening now, something that’s happened a long time ago, or something that will happen at the end of time. The thematic problems that Milton is attempting to tackle are written into the very grammar and the syntax of the poem.

Now, Milton understands the problems besetting what we could think of as the poem’s confused temporality; he understands this a lot better than we do. And there’s a self-consciousness about the temporal strangeness of this poem that leads, I think, to its crisis moment. Look at stanza sixteen. This is the stanza that begins with line 150. Milton has just been entertaining the glorious moment of the apocalypse at the end of time – because he’s always looking further and further and further ahead. He’s been doing that when we get this. Line 150:

    But wisest Fate says no,
    This must not yet be so,
    The babe lies yet in smiling Infancy,
    That on the bitter cross
    Must redeem our loss;
    So both himself and us to glorify…

“But wisest Fate says no, / this must not yet be so.” It’s here that we have something like a crystallizing moment of reality-testing. Milton, he checks himself. Reality intrudes and the poet has no choice but to say, “No. You’ve gone too far. You’ve gone too far in your anticipation of the future event at the end of time. Fate will permit no apocalypse before its time, before the necessary and painful steps that have to lead up to the Last Judgment. Before the ecstatic fulfillment of all of Christian history, the great Christian narrative – Jesus actually, of course, has to grow up and lead his life and then sacrifice that life on the bitter cross.”

In alluding to the prophet Isaiah in the prelude, Milton suggested that the iniquity of his lips had to be purged off – burned off, with the live coal supplied by one of the seraphim. One of those sins, I think, that needs to be purged is clearly the sin of eagerness or over-anticipation, the drive to move ahead of oneself and the drive to get ahead of others (as we saw Milton trying to do with the Three Wise Men). These are drives that the poem seems to be struggling to keep in check, or that Milton is representing the poem as struggling to keep in check, or to purge in some way.

But there’s something else that needs to be purged, and the poem recognizes that even more profoundly. The Nativity Ode is continually presenting the speaker with temptations, with incitements to sin that need to be purged from the speaker’s poetic voice. The final section of the poem presents us with the most powerful temptation that John Milton can confront, and we will find that this is a problem that continues for the rest of his writing life. He will have to do battle with this temptation forever: the temptation offered by classical literature. You remember that Milton had vowed to his friend Charles Diodati in the Sixth Elegy that he would become an epic poet some day, and that he was taking all of the necessary steps to transform himself into an epic poet.

But it’s strictly a Christian epic poem that Milton seems to imagine himself as writing. Now, he hasn’t yet settled on the topic of the Fall, the fall of Adam and Eve from their place of bliss in the Garden of Eden. But Milton knows that the general feeling of the thing is, of course, going to be Christian, and he’s probably taking as his model at this point the Italian poet Torquato Tasso who wrote Jerusalem Delivered, a slightly earlier Christian epic poem, romance-epic poem, that Milton greatly admired. But Milton’s also sensitive to the fact that the very phrase “Christian epic” is in some way a contradiction in terms. The epic form is a classical, pagan form. It’s a poem structured around the interaction between human beings and an entire pantheon of pagan deities. To write any kind of epic at all might very well seem to be embracing an inappropriately sensual paganism at the expense of the higher discipline of good, old-fashioned monotheistic Christianity. And the ode, too – the form in which this poem is written – is a pagan form invented by the Greek poet Pindar to express the sublimities of emotion arising from a contemplation of the actions of the gods.

Now, in writing in these genres, Milton is, of course, confronted with a dilemma. He’s a humanist scholar. He is more steeped in the sensuous beauty of classical literature, the classical tradition, than probably anyone else of his generation. Since he was an unusually small lad, he had been mainlining Greek and Roman poetry. The language of Homer and of Virgil and of Pindar and of Ovid had become an inextricable part of his literary imagination and of his consciousness in general. But Milton was also beginning to develop in this period a much more strict, a much more disciplined religious temperament. He was beginning to join ranks with those early seventeenth-century English Protestants who imposed upon themselves rigorous and strict codes of behavior and self-denial, and who were increasingly being called by their enemies Puritans. And it’s possible that the very idea of a Puritan poet presented Milton with what may have felt like an insoluble conflict. It’s possible that Milton would continue – well, if Milton were to continue this cultivation of a poetic career, he would clearly have to purge (this is the Miltonic logic at this stage) he would have to purge his poetic voice of the sin and the taint of pagan iniquity. If he was going to become a specifically Christian poet, he would have to expel from his system the sensual world of classical learning that for him was at the very core of his being.

And it’s precisely a silencing of classical literature that Milton is attempting to effect here. With the scene of the flight of the pagan gods at the nativity of Christ Milton is also depicting a scenario that, I think, on some level he’s hoping will occur within himself. We have the silencing not just of any literature here but of pagan literature. It’s now the pagan deities who have turned into “infant” gods. Milton is narrating or representing the process by which they are silenced. They’re rendered speechless or dumb, and the poem effects this process in order to give someone else an opportunity to speak. Milton calls upon a whole range of violent, exciting, militaristic images, and set-pieces to describe the triumph of Christ over the petty gods of paganism, but this routing of the gods brings with it a certain cost. Something is lost here as well. Look at line 181. Hands down, these are, for me, the best lines in the poem:

    The lonely mountains o’er,
    And the resounding shore,
    A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
    From haunted spring and dale
    Edg’d with poplar pale,
    The parting genius is with sighing sent;
    With flow’r-inwov’n tresses torn
    The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

It’s here in this stanza, filled with the resounding voices of weeping and lament, that we realize that something more is going on than merely a routing of the pagan gods, something more even than Milton’s pious triumph over his classical literary imagination. Suddenly, the literary genre that Milton is writing in is no longer this triumphant classical ode. You have an elegy here, a beautiful and plangent lament for something or someone lost. And we have to ask ourselves, “Could this be a paradise lost?” We hear a clear mourning for those pagan beings who are forced to depart because of the violent onset of Christianity. When Milton writes that “the parting Genius is with sighing sent,” he means the genius loci or the local spirit of the place, the natural spirit of a place: those beneficent beings that pagans had believed inhabited certain woods and streams. But the parting genius is also a part of Milton’s own genius, his literary genius, that aspect of his literary career and his literary expertise that has been nourished and fed, lovingly fed, by classical literature.

The conflictedness that Milton is encapsulating here is probably most intense in the last lines of this wonderful stanza: “With flow’r-inwov’n tresses torn / the Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.” This densely tangled thicket of clustered consonants in this amazing couplet is a signal to us of the weight, of the import, of this terrible event. These are difficult lines physically to read, and they may very well be the most painful lines in the entire poem from an emotional perspective. It’s one thing for the evil pagan deities like Moloch and Peor to be forced in to hell by the newly born Christ. Who are they to us? We find it difficult to bewail their absence. But the nymphs in all of their sensuous beauty, with “flow’r-inwov’n tresses,” they have to experience the same fate. I think it’s impossible not to wince when we imagine the painful tearing of the nymphs’ tresses. Their hair gets caught on the tangled thickets of the forest as they abandon – as they are forced to abandon – the classical corners of Milton’s literary imagination.

The elegiac tone of this final section of the poem should give us some clues to the type of victory over paganism that Christ’s birth is actually heralding here. How new will this new world order actually be? We may imagine that henceforth, now that he has written his Nativity Ode, Milton has fully expunged from his literary system that youthful attachment to the pagan classics. But the expulsion of paganism described in the Nativity Ode is a scene that Milton will return to and return to again and again, and in many ways it will be Christianity’s triumph over paganism and all of the pain that that triumph produces that will become the hidden subtext of many of Milton’s greatest works.