( It’s based on those of the New Jersey State Traffic Cops, I believe - The Highway Patrol )
“My Punishment is More Than I Can Bare.”
— which means that he will be driven out of his mind by his guilt and cursed to live forever, unable to cope in his mind with the things that he did.... Thus, he suffers a psychotic break and forgets Who He Is and What He Has Done.
“Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of The Earth
- which is why people think he’s The Man in The Moon -
and from thy face shall I be hid;
No-one will recognise him, even God — which is why he has to be marked.
and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in The Earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.”
He will manifest in The Guise of a Persecuted and Crazy Tramp or Drifter with Memory-Loss and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder :
JOHN RAMBO
And The LORD said unto him,
Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain,
vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.
And The LORD set a mark upon Cain,
lest any finding him should kill him.
And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in The Land of Nod, on The East of Eden.
He goes down to live in The Wilderness as a Wildman or Hermit, to dwell amongst The Wretched of The Earth.
Col. Vincent Kane :
In order for Life to have appeared spontaneously on earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of The Ninth Configuration.
But given the size of The Planet Earth, do you know how long it would have taken for just one of these protein molecules to appear entirely by chance?
Roughly ten to the two hundred and forty-third power billions of years. And I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in a God.
Captain Billy Cutshaw :
I tried, sir. See The Stars?
So cold, so far, and so very lonely. Oh, so lonely.
All that Space... just... Empty Space.
And so far from Home.
I've circled round and round this house, orbit after orbit.
Sometimes I wonder what it'd be like never to stop, and circle alone up there forever.
And what if I got there - got to The Moon - and couldn't get back?
Sure, everyone dies, but I'm afraid to die ALONE, so far from Home.
And if there's no God, then that's really, REALLY alone.
You see, his only hope of finding cure for himself is to wipe away The Guilt by a Saving Act... by curing the other inmates, or at least see some improvement.
But that takes time.
Time and your help.
Captain Cutshaw,
I'm taking my life, in the hope that my death will provide the shock that is curative in therapy.
Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a Man.
In northern California, the Santa Lucia Mountains, dark and brooding, stand like a wall between the peaceful agricultural town of Salinas and the rough and tumble fishing port of Monterey, fifteen miles away.
"1917 Monterey, just outside the city limits"
“ So, tell me: About how long have you been feeling depressed? ...”
Okay, we can come back to that later.
If you are going to undergo psychoanalysis with me, perhaps it might be better if I started, and told you how I go about things.
I'm not really a •strict• Freudian psychoanalyst, you understand —almost nobody is a strict Freudian these days.... But, that is not to say that the old boy doesn't have his influence.
It's amazing, you know: Sigmund Freud's scientific credibility was nearly DESTROYED —
but, right after World War II, his ideas became
THE MOST WIDELY DISCUSSED IDEAS IN AMERICA.
Do you know WHY he became so popular....?
Because he said that it was OKAY to be a pessimist;
he proved that if you were unhappy, that it was okay,
and it wasn't your fault.
And, I can't help noticing that you, personally, don't appear very pessimistic; as a matter of fact, you look rather optimistic.
TOO MUCH OPTIMISM IS HOW A LOT OF PEOPLE GET DEPRESSED :
They THINK they can solve the problems of the whole world; all they have to do is get people to act rationally.
You put too much faith in the Power of Reason, and you FAIL, just end up making yourself depressed.
Sigmund Freud understood that—that down deep, people AREN’T reasonable.
That is why my old teacher Erich Fromm back in 1970 said that psychoanalysis was really
"The Science of Human Irrationality."
Cal Trask :
My Mother... She's not dead and gone to Heaven... is she?
ADAM :
Why do you ask that?
Cal Trask :
She's not dead at all.
She's not buried in The East like you said, either.
She's alive.
ADAM :
What makes you think so?
Cal Trask
I heard from a guy.
ADAM :
Who?
Cal Trask
I don't know his name.
He was just passing through.
How come you told Aron and me she died?
ADAM :
I thought it would save you pain.
Cal Trask
Pain?
If she was still alive, where do you think she'd be?
ADAM :
I have no idea.
She went East.
Cal Trask
How do you know?
ADAM :
When she left The Ranch we lived on when you and Aron were born...
I heard she went East.
Cal Trask
What was she like?
Was she bad?
ADAM :
I guess she...
I never really knew what she was like.
She wasn't like Other People.
There was something she seemed to lack.
Kindness, maybe. Conscience.
I never knew what she was after.
Cal Trask
How come she left you?
ADAM :
I never knew that, either.
She was so full of hate.
Cal Trask
Hate for you?
ADAM :
For everything.
You won't tell Aron that she didn't die?
Cal Trask
No.
Must not do anything to hurt Aron.
Where'd you get that scar you got on your shoulder, Father?
ADAM :
I've told you, Cal.
It's an old wound I got in the Indian campaigns.
Why do you ask that now?
Cal Trask
What'd she look like?
Was she pretty?
ADAM :
She had the most lovely hands.
Like ivory.
She took such good care of them.
Her mother had arthritis.
She was always afraid it would come to her in her hands.
Cal Trask
Talk to me, Father.
I got to know Who I Am.
I got to know Who I'm Like.
I got to know...
Where is She?
ADAM :
I'm telling you, truthfully, Cal.. after she left, I never heard from her.
Cal, wait. I want to talk more with you.
If you leave this room now, we may never be able to talk again.
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.
" Maury Gellman, Nobel Prize-winner, got his Three-Quark-Model out of Finnegan’s Wake…. The Three Quarks are major characters in Finnegan’s Wake, the two twins who are opposites, and the third twin who is both twins combined and still a third independent character.
In order to understand thoughts like that, two twins who are the opposite, and the third who combines both of them, you gotta think in a Taoist way – like the joke which goes : –
Q : ‘How Many Zen Masters Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?’
Three
A : ‘One to Change it, and One Not to Change it.’
That’s the logic of the Shem, Ham, Japeth relationship in Finnegan’s Wake, which is also the Bacon, Shakespeare, Raleigh relationship, and the Tom, Dick and Harry, and many other types of Trilogies of The Human Mind, including The Holy Trinity.
SPOCK–KIRK–McCOY
David,
Son of Kirk (Which Means 'Church')
Kirk (Which Means 'Church'),
Father of None,
Captain without Sail
Mc.Coy, Leonard H.,
Son of David
And Godfather, Dogfather and Coo, which is "
Milton (ENGL 220) An introduction to John Milton: Man, Poet, and Legend.
Milton's place at the center of the English literary canon is asserted, articulated, and examined through a discussion of Milton's long, complicated association with literary power. The conception of Miltonic power and its calculated use in political literature is analyzed in the feminist writings of Lady Mary Chudleigh, Mary Astell, and Virginia Woolf. Later the god-like qualities often ascribed to Miltonic authority are considered alongside Satan's excursus on the constructed nature of divine might in Paradise Lost, and the notorious character's method of analysis is shown to be a useful mode of encountering the author himself. 00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction: Milton's Power as a Poet 15:37 - Chapter 2. Lady Mary Chudleigh on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes 19:42 - Chapter 3. Mary Astell on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes
24:03 - Chapter 4. Virginia Woolf on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes
32:20 - Chapter 5. Milton, Power and the Revolution against God by Satan Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website:
Milton, Power, and the Power of Milton
Chapter 1. Introduction: Milton’s Power as a Poet [00:00:00]
Professor John Rogers: For a vast number of complicated reasons, Milton has invited for 350 years now a uniquely violent – and I do think it’s a violent – response to the particular question of his value as a poet. And the violence, I think, of this reaction is due in large part to our tendency to think of Milton and of Milton’s work in terms of the category of power. So I’ve given this first lecture a title, the title being “Milton, Power, and the Power of Milton,” because any introduction to Milton has to confront the long-standing conviction in English letters of Milton’s power or his strength as a poet. It’s practically impossible to begin a reading of Milton without the burden of innumerable prejudices and preconceptions. Milton’s reputation always precedes him. And in fact that’s always been the case even in his lifetime. Even if we’ve heard of nothing of Milton the poet or nothing of Milton the man, we’re certainly, of course, likely to have heard of Adam and Eve and of the story of the Garden of Eden, and so it’s especially difficult to read Paradise Lost without bringing to it some sense of the power of the religious problems, the theological and ethical problems, that that story seems so powerfully to set out to address.
Now readers of English literature talk about Milton very differently from the way they talk about other writers. Historically, it has not been pleasure or wit or beauty that has been associated with the experience of reading Milton. Those are the categories of value that we tend to associate or to affiliate with our other favorite writers, writers as diverse as Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, for example. But in our collective cultural consciousness, if there is a such thing, whether we like him or not we tend to think of John Milton as powerful. And the reasons for this coupling of the name Milton and of this idea or the metaphor of power, I think, are worth looking in to.
Power is a conceptual category that Milton brooded on and cultivated his entire writing life. From a very early age, Milton nursed the image of himself as a powerful poet. In Milton we have a man who was able to state – now just think about this for a moment, I take this to be an absolutely remarkable fact – we have in Milton a man who was able to state categorically in his early twenties–so just a few years older than you are now– that the epic poem that he would not even begin writing for another twenty-five years would become an unforgettable work of English literature. Milton anticipated and lovingly invested all of his energy in his future literary power and his future literary fame. He anticipated this power much as his father, a reasonably well-to-do banker, might have anticipated long-term earnings from a particularly risky business venture.
In Milton’s case this investment in power paid off. Milton would eventually come to feel so comfortable with the mantle of power that he was able to do much more than simply rewrite the first books of the Bible (which is of course one of the things that he accomplished in Paradise Lost, and that is itself no mean undertaking). By the end of his life, though, Milton would in effect try to rewrite everything. After he’d published all of his major poems, he began publishing a spate of works that attempted to re-create British culture from the ground up. He invented his own system of philosophical logic. He published a treatise that he had written earlier on grammar, inventing his own system for the understanding and the learning of the Latin language. He wrote a long and detailed history of Britain, attempting to create the meaning of that little island that he always assumed was God’s chosen nation. And finally, and probably for Milton most important, Milton wrote a theology, inventing in effect his own religion; and Milton’s Protestantism looks like no one else’s, before or since. There’s a real sense, I think, in which Milton wanted to re-create all of Western culture or to re-create all of Western culture in his own image. Regardless of what we think of the success of that example or of the appeal of the attempt to do such a thing, the amazing thing, I think, is that Milton felt so empowered even to embark on such an enormous project. And readers of Milton ever since have had to confront not just Milton’s writing but this unspeakable sense of empowerment that underlies just about everything that Milton writes. And so it seems to me that a useful introduction to the poetry of Milton would be a look at some of the various types of power that Milton imagines in his work and some of the types of power that literary history has tended to confer upon Milton the man, the image of Milton the man, and of Milton’s writing.
Now, probably the form of power that we most readily associated with John Milton involves his position at the dead center of the English literary canon. This goes beyond questioning. He’s an object of worship by British and American institutions of higher education, and my guess is that few of you have failed to observe that it’s practically impossible to graduate from Yale with a Bachelor of Arts in English without having read Paradise Lost either in English 125, or DS Litm or, in fact, in a course just like this one. Those of you who are taking this course because you have to take one of the pre-1800s and Milton is one of those, you are more than entitled to ask why the poet, this poet, Milton, is exercising this institutional sway over you as you go about choosing your courses or perhaps as you experience your courses in some way as having been chosen for you.
It would be utterly inadequate for us to account for this institutional and surreal institutional power that Milton holds over us by stating blandly that Milton is the greatest English poet. That’s the easy answer obviously, and of course it’s not untrue. But we can do better than that. We can anatomize some of the forms of power that have been most commonly attributed to this greatest English poet. There is first the understandable aesthetic power, the power of the beauty of Milton’s verse, an aesthetic power that’s often thought or felt to inhere somewhere in the poetry itself. In fact for readers of Paradise Lost, and this has been an experience now for a few hundred years, it does often seem as if there were some mysterious life force, a pulsating through Milton’s dense and driving lines of unrhymed, iambic pentameter. And now there’s also the power that Milton himself claimed was behind the poetry of Paradise Lost. Milton insisted–and it’s completely possible that he might actually have believed–that God Himself was responsible for composing the poetry of Paradise Lost, that John Milton was merely the conduit for God’s first serious attempt at an epic poem. And so in this perspective we have an image of the awesome power of the Deity Himself thundering away behind every jot and tittle of Milton’s great epic.
But for Milton’s contemporaries in the seventeenth century, Milton’s power really wasn’t at all aesthetic or even religious in nature. Milton’s power was primarily seen as social and political and cultural. This is a wildly anachronistic use of terms, but there’s nonetheless a lot of sense of it: Milton was essentially a left-wing political radical and it was widely feared by his more timid contemporaries that his writings would seduce his readers in to rejecting good, old-fashioned, traditional religious and social values. There was a lot of validity to that contemporary cultural fear. Milton was a revolutionary. He was responsible for writing the first justification for an armed rebellion against a legitimate monarch, the first to publish such a work in, essentially, all of Europe. Milton actually wrote that it was the duty, not just the right but the duty, of a nation to rise up and dethrone through execution an unjust, though legitimate, king. Milton in fact was largely responsible in a cultural sense for the fact that the armed rebellion of England’s civil war, what we think of as the Puritan Revolution, actually led to the execution by decapitation of England’s monarch Charles the First in 1649. And on top of all of this political revolution, the political radicalism, Milton was one of the first intellectuals in Europe to speak out in favor not only of divorce – Milton argued for the right to divorce on grounds of incompatibility – but also he argued in favor of the right to plural marriage, polygamy. He was branded as a radical and dangerous debunker of traditional Christian family values.
Now, many of you know that Milton in his later years was blind, and the fact of his blindness was in his own day frequently cited by contemporary preachers, men at the pulpit, as an example of exactly how God punishes those who dare to write against the king or those who dare to write against the institution of marriage or the family. And Milton’s power for so many of these contemporaries was seen as palpably destructive and truly frightening. Obviously, it goes without saying that today the assessment of Milton as some kind of imminent social threat or some sort of social force in terms of the radical nature of political power – that has taken a sharp turn. Milton is much more likely imagined to wield – and if you have any sense of what the mythology surrounding Milton is, you would have to agree with this – a socially conservative power over his readers.
In the debates ranging for the last thirty years or so over the value of traditional pedagogy and over the value of canonical reading lists, Milton is always cited, invariably cited, as the canon’s most stalwart representative of oppressive religious and social values. There’s no question: Milton is the dead white male poet par excellence in English letters certainly, and his poetry works, at least from this point of view, to solidify those dead white male values, whatever those are, in the unsuspecting minds of his readers, none of whom obviously are dead and many of whom are neither white nor male. Milton’s power from this perspective of the radical cultural critique is really not so different from the power of the late Jerry Falwell or someone like Rush Limbaugh. There is something insidious and culturally malicious and powerful about the social conservatism of what is thought to be his voice.
Now this is the contemporary picture of John Milton and this more or less contemporary picture of Milton as a powerful force of conservatism derives in large part from the English writer Virginia Woolf, who wrote about Milton during the 1920s. It’s Woolf’s image that’s probably the one that’s most firmly rooted in the minds of Milton’s readers today. For Virginia Woolf, especially in A Room of One’s Own, the dead writer Milton exercises an active power at the present moment as he forces his female readers to accept their subordinate place in society; and the text of Milton, and especially of Paradise Lost, therefore has to be seen as an active, persistently malignant conveyor of patriarchal oppression. Now, like all judgments of literary value and literary power and force, the twentieth-century feminist evaluation of Milton, Virginia Woolf’s, has a complicated and long prehistory, and it’s worth our while to look briefly at some of the complicated steps by which an evaluation like Virginia Woolf’s actually comes in to being. So let me take you back. You can now look at your handouts. Let me take you back to the seventeenth century, up to the very beginning of the literary reception of John Milton.
Milton, who had died in 1674, had established himself as a great English poet within twenty or so years of his death. As early as the late seventeenth century, Milton had already entered what we can think of as the English literary canon. For many of his younger contemporaries, he was a canonical authority whose wisdom, whose mere opinions, could be cited as proof, as some sort of indisputable evidence, for one position or another And an extraordinarily ambitious poet like Milton naturally derived a great deal of satisfaction, I’m convinced, in his own lifetime, in anticipating just this kind of posthumous respect and worship, the fantasy of his fellow Englishmen quoting him as an authority much as he himself had for so many decades quoted scripture.
Chapter 2. Lady Mary Chudleigh on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes [00:15:37]
Now, one of the earliest – and I think this is a remarkable fact – one of the earliest citations of Paradise Lost that actually appears in print in the seventeenth century comes from the proto-feminist writer Lady Mary Chudleigh. Chudleigh dared to argue – and it’s an amazing argument, given the time – in 1699 Chudleigh argued that a woman could be considered and should be considered as excellent a creature as a man, that women might actually be as ontologically valuable as men. And in making such a point, Chudleigh naturally had to confront – as writers have for millennia – Chudleigh had to confront the problem of the scriptural account of the priority of the sexes, the suggestion that many readers extract from the Book of Genesis in the Bible that the initial creation of the male of the species, Adam, seems to establish the privileged rank of the entire male sex. And so Chudleigh attempts to demonstrate – and this is the passage at the top of the handout – Chudleigh attempts to demonstrate that the Genesis story of Adam and Eve establishes no such thing. She writes,
Woman’s being created last will not be a very great argument to debase the dignity of the female sex. If some of the men own this [she continues] ‘tis more likely to be true. The great Milton, a grave author, brings in Adam thus speaking to Eve in Paradise Lost [and then she quotes Adam speaking to Eve], “Oh, fairest of creation, last and best of all God’s works.”
The great Milton can be invoked here because he has already been established as an authority. He’s already been established as a figure whose very word possesses something like an indisputable cultural power. So as a very “grave author” – and this is what Chudleigh is implying – Milton can tell us something potentially true about the priority of the sexes.
Of course–and you know this to be the case from your own writing of papers in the English department– like any literary critic who ever tried to write an analysis of anything, Chudleigh has no choice but to nudge the lines that she’s quoting out of context. It’s been said that to quote anybody is necessarily to misrepresent him, and this fact is obviously a very good thing for Lady Mary Chudleigh since Milton would certainly not himself have wanted to suggest that women are superior to men. Milton, in fact, soon goes on in Paradise Lost – right after this very passage that she cites, Milton the narrator berates Adam for his overvaluation of his wife through the character of the Archangel Raphael. I think this is one of the great ironies of English literary history, certainly in the reception of the poet Milton, that one of the very first published discussions of Milton’s epic attempts to enlist John Milton as a proponent of feminism.
Now we don’t have to be overly concerned here with what I take to be Chudleigh’s generous oversight of Milton’s generally sexist bias. What’s important for our immediate purposes is her identification of Milton as a cultural authority. He’s a literary power, a figure who could be called upon to supply the voice of tradition in itself. He can be called upon in fact exactly as he is by Lady Mary here. He can be called upon to contradict scripture: and it’s this power to contradict the Word of God that makes Milton a force than which it’s hard to imagine anything more powerful.
Chapter 3. Mary Astell on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes [00:19:42]
Now as you can see from the handout, Milton is discussed in a very different manner a year later in a work published by Mary Astell in 1700 and in an even more remarkably feminist cry for the liberation of women from what she describes and characterizes as domestic oppression. Astell writes the following:
Patience and submission are the only comforts that are left to a poor people who groan under tyranny unless they are strong enough to break the yoke. Not Milton himself would cry up liberty to poor female slaves or plead for the lawfulness or resisting a private tyranny.
So Milton for Astell is hardly the embodiment of orthodoxy that he is for Lady Mary Chudleigh. For Astell, Milton remains the subversive revolutionary whose treatises against the tyranny of the Stuart monarchy, whose treatises against the tyranny of Charles the First established his reputation as a liberator, a liberator of all of the oppressed and enslaved citizens of England, and that’s Milton’s rhetoric; that rhetoric belongs to Milton himself. But Astell resents, of course, Milton here, and what she resents is the limitation of his subversiveness. He refused to extend his critique of tyranny in the political realm to a critique of man’s domestic tyranny over woman in the private realm, in the domestic sphere. It’s as if Mary Astell were saying, “Well, Milton was on the right track. He simply didn’t go far enough. He didn’t extend the logic of his position.”
Now it has to be said that Mary Astell’s image of Milton is probably the product of a much closer reading of Paradise Lost than Lady Mary Chudleigh’s was. Astell certainly seems to have noticed Milton’s notorious and, of course, deplorable line in Paradise Lost about God’s creation of Adam and Eve: “He for God only, she for God in him,” Milton’s narrator tells us of God’s creation of Adam and Eve. Mary Astell is clearly responding to this. Her statement points to a persistent worry, and it’s a worry that exists even now in the twentieth century about the nature of Milton’s power. Is this guy a revolutionary or is he a reactionary? Astell distinguishes Milton’s cry against political tyranny from her own critique, her own cry against the patriarchal tyranny, and in making this distinction she’s exposing something that I take to be extremely interesting. She’s exposing the uncomfortable affinity between two competing, equally progressive social movements. You’ll see this phenomenon manifest itself throughout your reading of Milton, I’m convinced; and what we see here is the strange proximity, and it’s often a very uncomfortable proximity, of Milton’s rhetoric of political liberation to the proto-feminist rhetoric of domestic liberation that is just beginning to emerge at the end of theseventeenth century.
Now in the middle years of the seventeenth century during the English revolution that saw the execution of the king and saw the establishment of a non-monarchic republican government, Milton had practically invented the formal language, the literary language, of insubordination. He developed an entire vocabulary, a rhetoric of righteous disobedience, of resistance, of protest and revolution. And I think it’s a measure of the power of Milton’s anti-tyrannical language that it can be used against Milton himself. A writer like Mary Astell can employ Milton’s revolutionary rhetoric to advance a cause to which John Milton himself would of course have had difficulty subscribing; a dead Milton could exercise a social power that had nothing whatsoever to do with the living Milton’s own social views.
Chapter 4. Virginia Woolf on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes [00:24:03]
Now we’ll fast forward a couple of centuries and look at Virginia Woolf. By the time we get to Woolf in the early part of the twentieth century, Milton has come to be associated with essentially all of these ways of thinking about power, however contradictory they are. He’s the very voice of traditional wisdom for some, as he was for Lady Mary Chudleigh. And he’s the voice of political subversiveness for others, as he was for Mary Astell. He’s the friend of women everywhere, at least for a few of his female readers in the eighteenth century, and for many he’s the very embodiment of oppressive patriarchy.
I mentioned earlier that it’s Virginia Woolf who’s largely responsible for our sense of Milton’s identity as an oppressive patriarchal literary voice, but Virginia Woolf, too, had inherited these contradictory ways of thinking about Milton and about Milton’s power. And you can see from the handout that in 1924, Woolf is beginning to formulate her dazzling feminist critique of the masculine traditions – what she thinks of as the masculine traditions of literary writing – and she’s not just one of the first literary critics to reveal that most famous writers have been men (everyone had already, had always known that), but she’s one of the first literary critics to reveal that most famous writers have been writing as men, exerting the influence of their sex (that’s to use her language) in a manner that implicitly glorifies their masculinity, implicitly glorifies all men.
But this is not so [she writes in 1924] with Milton. There’s [and this is Woolf’s amazing argument here] a small group of writers whose work [and I’m quoting her] is pure, uncontaminated, sexless as the angels are said to be sexless and Milton is their leader [she tells us].
Like Lady Mary Chudleigh, Woolf holds up Milton as a powerful authority. He’s almost a mythological figure who can sanction, who can authorize this revolution in women’s writing that Virginia Woolf is beginning to prophesy here early in the twentieth century.
But this of course, as we know, is only one of the ways in which Milton’s power, or what Woolf thinks of as his leadership, can be thought of. In 1928, and this is the next quotation on the handout, Milton has come to represent for Virginia Woolf a very different type of cultural force. Near the conclusion of the perfectly extraordinary book A Room of One’s Own, Woolf elaborates on her prophecy of a feminist future, a world in which women can be viewed – a literary feminist future – a world in which women can be viewed as writers of no less stature and of no less power than men. So this is Woolf I am quoting:
For my belief is [and I’ll have to skip around a little bit] that if we live another century or so and have 500 a year each of us and rooms of our own, if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think, if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.
Now the language is intentionally and really sublimely opaque and apocalyptic here as Woolf imagines what might have happened to Judith Shakespeare had she been given the cultural opportunities of her more privileged brother, William, but the anticipated triumph of women writers can never occur, according to Virginia Woolf here, until we look past “Milton’s bogey” – until we look past “Milton’s bogey.” She’s ingeniously vague about what Milton’s bogey is. I have puzzled over this, I’ve puzzled over this phrase for years, and I’m not even remotely satisfied that I have a clue what she means: but Milton’s bogey would seem to be, I think, that frightening shadow that Milton casts over wives who might find themselves identifying with the subordinate Milton’s Eve. Milton’s bogey seems to be the specter hovering over women poets or women writers who may find in Milton an identification of poetic strength with masculinity itself.
Now Woolf doesn’t try to explain exactly how it is that Milton is shutting out the view, and she doesn’t try to explain what the view would look like if it weren’t shut out. But in citing the power of what she claims to be this Puritan bogey, Virginia Woolf really suddenly reveals, I think, how difficult it is even for her to shut out entirely the real–or it might just be the bogus–power of John Milton. At the very moment that Woolf advises women readers to look past Milton’s bogey, she finds herself in the peculiar position of echoing the poetry of John Milton. This is, I think, an unbelievable thing to have happen at one of the formative moments of twentieth-century feminism. She’s alluding here, I think, to one of the most famous passages in Paradise Lost in which Milton is asserting nothing other than his poetic power.
This is on the handout. The blind poet calls on the Holy Spirit to assist him in the composition of the epic. He asks the Heavenly Muse at the end of the passage to help him “see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight,” and Milton’s going to need this additional help from God because, as he says – this is near the middle of the passage – because “wisdom at one entrance is quite shut out.” Milton’s blindness, the fact of his blindness, has shut out his view of the visible world, which would ordinarily present itself to him through the entrance of his eyes; and this shut-out will enable him, will help him, explore the invisible world of divine truth.
Now when Virginia Woolf writes that Milton’s bogey has shut out the view of his female readers, she seems to be suggesting that the specter of Milton blinds women to the things that they should be seeing, the most important truths out there in the world. How troubling though – this seems undeniable – and how strange that Woolf really at her most radical is echoing the very words of the power that she’s opposing! It’s almost as if she were saying in some way, in a post-Miltonic world, which is the world that we all live in, it’s impossible fully to look past Milton’s bogey; that the rhetoric of power, the literary strategies of power, and in some cases the very experience of power, have become inextricably tied and indebted to Milton. And in this great prophecy of twentieth-century feminism, Woolf is essentially proposing a cultural revolution. And it’s as if the text here were telling us that whether we like it or not, whether we like Milton or not, the language of revolution is one that is forever and always indebted to that bogeyman John Milton, as Virginia Woolf had written, “Milton is our leader.”
Chapter 5. Milton, Power and the Revolution against God by Satan [00:32:20]
Now some of you I’m assuming will already have read Paradise Lost and so it will come to you as no surprise that the representation of power for which Milton is most celebrated is the power exhibited in the failed revolution against God, the revolution against God by Satan and his fellow rebels. My guess is that our sense of Milton’s power, however that power is imagined, is intimately related to the way in which Milton himself represents power in the characters of Satan and of God in Paradise Lost. Look at the next passage. This is from Paradise Lost. Satan and the rebel angels have been roundly defeated. They’ve been humiliated by the Son of God and the other priggish loyalist angels so they are pained, utterly humiliated. They’re prostrate on the burning lake of this miserable new realm called hell, yet nonetheless Satan pulls himself together and begins to analyze, to theorize, his situation. He describes for us his own power that somehow manages to survive even a terrifying and humiliating defeat like the one he’s just experienced. So this is Satan:
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power
Who from the terror of this Arm so late
Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall. (I.105-116)
Now we might at first think that Satan’s vaunting here is the product of nothing more elevated than hate and a desire for revenge, but Milton’s doing something truly extraordinary. I think that the imaginative achievement here in Satan’s speech is easy to miss. Satan finds it ignominious and shameful to lower himself to God, to bow and sue for grace with suppliant knee and deify His power, but this kind of submission is shameful not because it’s simply always shameful so to debase oneself. It’s an ignominy and a shame because it may very well be – I think this is without question what Satan is implying here – it may very well be that God is not actually omnipotent. Would an omnipotent, would a truly all-powerful God actually doubt the extent of His own empire? In Virginia Woolf’s terms, Satan is trying to look past God’s bogey. He tries to get behind the highly theatrical, the culturally constructed illusion of God’s power, and you can hear Satan saying, “Well, so what if we lost? We may have lost this battle, but the important thing is that God revealed a terror of this arm, of our strength. A fear of the military strength of the rebel angels is what was manifest in this war. God was so afraid of us that He actually doubted His hold on His own empire, an empire that He was only actually able to maintain because of good luck or something like superior military firepower, but certainly nothing as grand and as absolute as omnipotence.”
This is an amazing thing for Satan to say after his fall. Even the expulsion of Satan from heaven was not sufficient to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the legitimate authority of God. That Satan is still able to doubt the legitimacy of God’s power is a testimony to the complexity, I think, of the analysis of power in Paradise Lost. No power, not even God’s power, can be irresistibly and indisputably proven. Satan refuses in this speech to deify the power of the conquering enemy, and in this refusal Satan resembles no one so much as John Milton: John Milton, the political leftist who refused to deify the power of the English king Charles the First, who so many of his contemporaries considered to be God’s anointed; John Milton who wrote hundreds of pages of anti-monarchic propaganda until King Charles’s head was safely severed from his body. Like Milton, Satan is in the business of demystifying power, of exposing political or cultural power as something that is not simply inherently there or naturally there. Power is something – and this is what we learn from a reading of John Milton – power is something that is created by a human process of deification, a process of king-worship or a process of God-worship or book-worship or a process, for that matter, of poet-worship.
Now later on in Paradise Lost, Satan comes to the conclusion that that old man in heaven who had assumed the authority to issue all of those arbitrary decrees – Satan finally relents and concedes that He is actually an omnipotent God and that that God actually is, or was, the omnipotent creator of all things. But despite this enormous concession and this realization, Satan is still justified, I think, in his cynical demystification of God’s behavior before the defeat of the rebel angels. And Satan complains now that God never bothered to demonstrate to the angels just how powerful He was. And so this is the last quotation on the handout. Satan again:
But He who reigns
Monarch in Heav’n, till then as one secure
Sat on his Throne, upheld by old repute,
Consent or custom, and his Regal State
Put forth at full, but still his strength conceal’d,
Which tempted our attempt and wrought our fall. (I.637-642)
Satan’s saying that before the war in heaven, God’s power just seemed like any other king’s power, as if God sat on the throne of heaven merely because of those humanly constructed reasons of tradition, or of old repute or consent or custom. Now alas for Satan, it turned out that God’s monarchy was actually based on genuine strength. It wasn’t simply that God just happened to be wearing the crown and just happened to be sitting in the best chair; but in Satan’s articulation of what we can think of as a dialectic of power and authority, he provides us with a useful analysis of the problems besetting any understanding of power. The kinds of authority established by the bogeys of tradition and custom and conservative tradition are not always distinguishable from the kinds of authority that are based on genuine strength. Even if we locate a source of some kind of genuine strength, authoritative strength, it’s still usually possible, as it is for Satan, to argue that that power is really at base just the concealed product of custom or what we would think of as cultural construction. To be a king, one need merely put forth one’s regal state, one simply needs to act kingly.
Now I raise the matter of Satan’s critique of God’s power because the evaluation and the criticism of Milton, and especially of Milton’s poetry, has hinged for a couple of centuries now on a related set of questions about this poet’s power. Is Milton powerful for the very straightforward reason that he’s in possession of this tremendous literary strength, this unimaginable talent? Or has Milton only seemed powerful because of the traditional religious values with which he is so intimately associated? Does Milton only seem powerful because he has the force or the strength of the age-old literary canon behind him? Does Milton only seem powerful because he’s the very literary embodiment of patriarchy and masculine bias?
It goes without saying that these are questions that it’s impossible for us to try to answer certainly now, but Milton lets us know later in Paradise Lost that Satan was wrong to embark on his dangerous deconstruction of divine power. Milton ultimately is a pious man and wants us to frown on Satan’s critique of the Judeo-Christian conception of divinity. But regardless of Milton’s ultimate dismissal of Satan’s position, Satan’s analysis of power, and of God’s power especially, isn’t that easily dismissible. And that’s not simply because Satan bears such a strong resemblance to Milton, as, of course, he does. I’m convinced Satan looks ahead to us as well. Satan resembles us as readers as we attempt to dissect and to anatomize the power of Milton’s poetry. I would go so far to say that something like a satanic sensibility may be one of our best guides in our reading of Milton. It’s Milton’s Satan who best prepares us – I’ll throw this out here at the end of this lecture – who best prepares us to explore what we can think of as the labyrinth of Miltonic power. He puts us in a position to explore that truly weird but undeniable process whereby the very word “Milton,” the name “Milton,” stops referring to a particular middle-class Londoner who was born in 1608 and begins to embody the very essence of that strange and inexplicable phenomenon that we call literary power.
So the lecture is over. For next time, make sure that you will have read at the very least Milton’s great poem, and he wrote it when he was only twenty-one years old, “The Ode on Christ’s Nativity.” And read, of course, the other two poems that were assigned for the class. But we’ll be focusing on what we call “The Nativity Ode.” Okay, that’s it.
