Today marks the 400th birthday of John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, Areopagitica, and countless other works that you should have read by now. To mark the occasion, enjoy the following thoughts on Milton taken from the Introduction to Nigel Smith's Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?, the much-reviewed introduction to the work of Milton we published earlier this year. Maybe it doesn't matter who exactly is better, but you'll notice that Smith makes the case for Milton as uniquely valuable to American readers, especially those who are also fans of the metal band Slayer. So happy birthday, John Milton, and here's what we have to say about you.
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From Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? by Nigel Smith (Harvard University Press, 2008):
INTRODUCTION
As I begin to write this book, the planet on which I live and work is transfixed by an international predicament that is intimately related to my subject. A nation-state with very considerable resources of nature, human wit, and technology has become the most powerful state in the world: the United States of America. It has done so in part through a theory of liberty that owes not a little to the author whose writings I’ll be examining. Being so powerful, it has inherited the role of world policeman, and as such finds itself on the receiving end of a deadly campaign by those whose conflicting ideals, having been failed by every nation-state, can be pursued only through another kind of opposition. I’m talking, of course, about the terrorists of Al-Qaeda.
Islamic terrorists do not care for Western liberalism, so they say, believing only in a very strict interpretation of the Koran and all of the denial that comes with it: of gender, sexuality, education, public consciousness, and so on. Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism often looks today like the kind of violent bigotry that was associated with so many of Milton’s coreligionists, the Puritans. The tightening of public controls—visible at airports and train stations—and the considerably enhanced powers of police investigation and detention that Western governments have adopted in order to combat the threat of terrorism are frequently denounced as a fatal compromise of the very principles of liberty on which our cherished open society is based. Islamic fundamentalists accuse America and its allies of perpetrating acts of imperialist aggression by backing Israel and corrupt, authoritarian Arab regimes. These nations display, it is alleged, a quest for control of the world’s oil resources as a thinly disguised ulterior motive. Traditionally, liberty-loving republicans do not approve of imperialism: “We are not a conquering people,” said President Bush at the beginning of the American and British invasion of Iraq. The defeat of terrorism, as it has been strategized thus far, involves the compromise of Western liberty (to a degree that makes some Christian fundamentalist supporters of President Bush, the descendents of the seventeenth-century Puritans, happy) in a cause that appears to many modern Western defenders of liberty as imperialistic and unjust. It is a knotty, paradoxical, bloody, unjust, depressing, disgraceful, unconscionable mess.
Or take the longer view. The Western powers evolved from early modern nation-states, most of which rose to a degree of world influence by creating mercantile and then political empires in other parts of the globe. Britain was the dominant world power in the nineteenth century, the United States for much of the twentieth, especially the last quarter. The West consists of liberal democracies that have relatively well educated middle classes and permit comparatively large degrees of personal autonomy—the ability of individuals to believe as they wish and to accumulate large sums of personal wealth. And the West has been pitted in a cold war against communist powers while seeking to maintain preeminent economic, political, and cultural influence in other parts of the world. Without the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to contend with after the collapse of communism in the late 1980s, the United States looks hypocritical to those elsewhere, using democracy as a mask for Western exploitation.
Yet we might say that the upside of this predicament is the worldwide spread of computer-driven information technology, enabling communication on a scale and at a rate that would have left the inventors of the printed book gaping in awe.Many people in the world now enjoy a “democracy of communication” unimaginable decades ago, a popular access to information and the power of communication that has aided not only learning and commerce but also political activity and indeed even terrorism. Will the microchip revolution be the savior of the planet, as we all battle the sustained and intensifying effects of heavy industry and face ecological catastrophe?
John Milton’s career and writings are vitally part of these very contemporary perspectives, even though he lived more than three hundred years ago. This is largely because Milton’s writings played such a dominant role in the discussions and definitions of liberty that surrounded the founding of the United States, connecting political theory and theology to widely read poetic literature.1 Most of the founding fathers read Milton and revered him. When Americans hear Milton read aloud, they hear the American constitution, because it is Milton’s prose that echoes originally in the voices of Adams and Jefferson. From then through Emerson and down to our own day, Milton and his writings have been placed, one way or another, at the center of what is meant to be quintessentially American. The Liberty Fund, a “private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals,” devotes a sizable part of its website to Milton’s poetry and prose and a discussion of his work. Milton’s voice has been equally admired and reviled by his countrymen, the English, who adore him as a poet but have remained largely hostile to his defamation of monarchy, even to the extent of converting him into a national poet by forgetting the partisan fissures that run through his works. But Western liberty of all kinds agrees that contemplative reading of serious issues is a proper end in itself, and Milton’s theorizing of the liberty to read as one of the highest goals of civilization is generally revered. Al-Qaeda would have all books except the Koran abolished. Milton’s writings are indelibly part of our civilization and its values, be they old-fashioned liberal humanist ones or market-driven monetarism, and generations of educated people have testified to the hold of his works, especially, of course, his magnificent epic poem Paradise Lost.
This book is a study not merely of why Milton continues to be relevant but of how he is still of use to us in our current predicaments, and of how he is more thoughtfully progressive and an even better poet for these reasons than we ever realized.
To use Milton to think through our contemporary dilemmas means to go back to appreciate the nature of his achievement. In summary form, that achievement sounds stupendous. He set out from an early age to become the complete poet: to master the art of poetry and then to write the greatest heroic poem in his own language, in a conscious dialogue with the best precepts of poetry and poetic achievement in ancient and more recent European languages. While he did this, programmatically and determinedly, it was also an interrupted process, and along the way he theorized religious, political, and civil liberty, including divorce and a theology of free will. He analyzed the nature of tyranny, he explored the ways in which republican liberty might be known to English people, and he defended the English republic to a European readership. He experimented with imagining different kinds of constitutional republicanism and debated with famous contemporaries, such as Harrington and Hobbes, the best way to form and run a state. He was in a good position to do so, because from 1649 until 1659–1660 he was a senior civil servant for both non-monarchical governments, the republic and the Protectorate. He was in charge of correspondence with foreign regimes, and before that he had some responsibility for licensing books. He was involved in state-funded attempts to generate a new republican culture of letters. His prose writings themselves are a kind of poetry, in which the vision of liberty is elaborated. Implicit within them are patterns of thinking and writing in a state of liberty, and as I shall show, they are of great value to us. All of these fine achievements were then recast during his later years (when he lived in modest retirement, officially shunned for his Puritanism and republicanism) in his three great poetic works, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, albeit more pessimistically, but no less thoughtfully, and in many ways more so. Soon after its publication, Paradise Lost was recognized as the greatest poem in the language, despite the repugnance for Milton’s political and religious views felt by some of his most eminent admirers. The admiration for the poem in Britain led to the construction of Milton’s reputation as the preeminent national poet, a reputation for the most part at odds with Milton’s views of English national achievements and with contemporary views of his republicanism.
The Milton I present may best be described as libertine, in the sense of a poet who dares to speculate on the highest and most perplexing matters in the most challenging of literary ways. He remade English literature, but in doing so he advanced a series of courageous heretical views that went clean against the dominant moral, religious, and political orthodoxies of his time. The majesty of his writing embodies that sense of rebellion, even as it honestly admits to the energy required by such a struggle against custom and the contradictions that such an enterprise necessarily involves. Even now, I believe that the nature and complexity of that contradictory energy is not appreciated, even by Milton specialists, and it is largely my purpose to set that record straight. In this way, the reach of Milton’s achievements is far greater than Shakespeare’s. However much we celebrate Shakespeare’s grasp of humanity or poetry, his troubling displays of power, and his wonderful and delightful exposure of sexual identity, however much great acting companies, actors, and actresses produce staggering performances of his plays, Milton’s interrogations of free will, liberty, and the threat to it are more riveting. No student of Milton has left Paradise Lost without feeling such an admiration, indeed an ardor of admiration.
Milton was born into a prosperous middle-class London family of Protestant and conformist views. He had the best education money could buy, at St. Paul’s School, before studying at Christ’s College, Cambridge, which he left after taking a B.A. in 1629 and an M.A. in 1632. Having put aside any thought of holy orders, he committed himself to a country retreat in order to study the art of being a poet, perhaps with an eye to future aristocratic or even royal patronage.He did this with some success, and by 1640 had accumulated an impressive collection of poems. These ranged from the avant-garde in diction and prosody to workings out of the English idioms of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson; to highly competent Latin elegies; to some daring Italian sonnets; to exquisite English poems on subjects including music, the power of the English vernacular, and the birth and death of Christ. There were also two phenomenal pieces that each radically transformed the genre in which they were written: A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (usually called Comus) and the pastoral elegy Lycidas.
This left him a somewhat known poet with a secure reputation; he would undoubtedly have been remembered as a significant post- Spenserian poet of the 1630s had he died in 1640. But then came the civil crisis of the midcentury. Milton had toured Italy as a way of furthering his education and claimed that he returned in order to be of use to his countrymen in a time of unrest. Indeed, he wrote a series of pro-Puritan tracts against the bishops, in which he began to offer a view of the poet as a national savior—a prophet for the nation. These are intriguing examples of a masterful writer flexing his muscles as a polemicist and satirist. They also reveal Milton to be grappling with major issues of political, religious, and literary difference in his day—the first formulation of his insight that we struggle for truth through the apprehension of contrarieties in the materials in front of us.
Yet this was nothing compared to what happened next. In 1642, Milton married, and it was clearly an unhappy, incompatible match. His wife returned to her father’s house, and Milton wrote a treatise in favor of divorce, against standard and hardly ever challenged precepts, using the astonishing argument that Christ’s denial of divorce was consistent with Moses’s permission for divorce. This staggering assertion outraged most divines and brought the author the unwelcome attention of Parliament. Milton had unwittingly garnered for himself the reputation of a religious radical and a moral libertine, and he may have published a collected edition of his poetry (much of what he had written up to 1645) in order to create an image of respectability. More than that, it was in the divorce writings, with their assault on major assumptions in philosophy and theology, that some more fundamental beliefs emerged in Milton’s mind—in particular the heresies of mortalism (the idea that the soul dies with the body until the general resurrection) and its anterior foundation, monism (the idea that everything in the universe is matter of some kind; there is no separation of the material and the immaterial, and no division of the soul and the body). The first divorce tract produced many hostile responses, which eventually compelled Milton to defend himself in three further tracts.
With Parliament introducing a book-licensing system of its own (after a long period of royal and church censorship and a brief period of press freedom), Milton defended freedom of the press in his famous Areopagitica, and in doing so offered the first mature version of his free-will theology: that if we are not allowed to choose between good and evil, we are alienating the image of God in us. Areopagitica had little or limited impact in the weeks immediately following its publication (its substantial fame followed fifty years later and thereafter), but it has the same energy, the same sense of contradiction, the voice of dissent as well as the voice of orthodoxy, that are present in the divorce tracts. All these tracts embody the sense of having read enormous amounts of printed material, to the extent that we feel the mind of the writer about to explode under the pressure of confronting it. In the space of about two years, three at the most, Milton had undergone several intellectual revolutions, and he had formulated theories of domestic and civil reformation that he thought went along with the parliamentarian and Puritan arguments for liberty from the king and his supporters. This body of work is Milton at his most optimistic; everything that followed bears in some sense the mark of compromise and disappointment. In being the intellectual rebel, Milton had also discovered the voice of Satan; he would nurture it in the following years of retirement and exile from the center of power, as he remade Western poetry in his great epic and its two sequel works and as he cast his continuing and unfading interrogation of liberty’s dimensions within those works. In several ways, rebellion is figured positively in Milton’s great statements of the 1640s, but it returned in the complicated darkness of both Satan and Samson, characters from texts that were completed when Milton had been cast aside and was treated officially with contempt. The oscillation of sympathy back and forth between Milton’s narrator and Satan is a further measure of the contradiction and chaos that underwrote this experience.
Milton is an author for all Americans, whether conservative, liberal, or radical, not only because he was a favorite of the founding fathers, so that his voice echoes through their writings, but also because
his visionary writing is a literary embodiment of so many of the aspirations that have guided Americans as they have sought to establish lived ideals of ethical and spiritual perfection. The resonance of his themes of liberty and deliverance has appealed to African- Americans like Eva Jessye, who cast Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as spiritual songs in the 1920s. To a large extent reading Milton requires engagement with rebellion, most fully embodied in the characters of Satan, the other rebel angels, and Adam and Eve and in the sense of rejection of the customary and the enslaving. After all, Milton wrote in support of a regicide. Necessarily there is substantial sympathetic engagement with characters and forms of intelligence regarded as conventionally “evil”—natural-born killers, so to speak—and an unending resistance to imposed authority and an attempt to build a world that happily embraces these contrary energies. Milton knew and loved Renaissance drama; he picks up the heretical dynamism of Christopher Marlowe’s compelling characters and makes much more of them, and in doing so he also moves far beyond the doubts that define but also limit Hamlet.
This book thus argues strongly against the two influential contentions of Stanley Fish: first, in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, that Milton was trying to induce sinful thoughts in his readers so that he could then teach them the error of their ways; and second, more recently, in How Milton Works, that Milton is the apologist for an ultimately theological and contained view of life.Milton’s celebration of contrariness and chaotic, various energy makes his art and thought escape from such limited descriptions and is peculiarly resonant with our own moment, and with the youth art of the past four decades. Milton’s art builds by pulling down. It is no surprise that one contemporary writer who has unashamedly made capital of Miltonic incarnations and themes, Philip Pullman (especially in the His Dark Materials trilogy), has enjoyed enormous international literary success. Or that Paradise Lost should so run through the narrative and visual dynamics of Neil Gaiman’s intelligent and brooding Sandman comic books. Or that themes of a challenge to oppressive organized religion delivered in “holy-war imagery” and with lyrics referring to psychological and physical mutilation in such circumstances should run through the work of the Grammy-winning metal band Slayer. Furthermore, Milton’s insights into the possibilities and limitations of scientific discovery chime with both our quest for knowledge and our now certain knowledge that we have damaged our world with our technology. Milton is an indubitably ecological poet in ways that our forefathers did not see, and his perceptiveness about the natural world is bound up with his heterodoxy.
Yet far from being the apostle of human limitation and the poet of a bigoted faith, Milton had an intense belief in the primacy of personal interpretations of the Bible that produced a vision of divine and human potential which is always reassessing its own foundations in a critical refusal of fixed and absolute standards of truth. Some would argue that Milton is already a postreligious writer—not a position that can readily be accepted except insofar as religion is defined as subservience to the authority and traditions of a church. Milton wants each person to think out truth for himself; heresy for Milton is a good thing. It is a vision that embraces the faithful and those who proclaim no faith, and its significance stems in large part from its thoughtful associations with both camps and draws them under one umbrella, encouraging them to deploy their rational powers as never before. Milton did not approve of blasphemy, but he did conceive of education and mental reflection as an ever-expanding, ever-self-revising project of interaction between person and world. The applications of his vision in a multicultural and multiethnic context have been overlooked; the capacity of his writings to facilitate cross-cultural mutual understanding has not yet been fully realized. It might be noted that Milton and his followers in Anglo- American tradition stand contrary to Leo Strauss and his followers (despite attempts by Straussians to co-opt Milton), whose elitist and authoritarian ideas are seen by many as having had a detrimental effect on intellectual life and on the current administration in particular. Straussians have tried to prove that there is a hidden and authoritarian truth in Milton; this study rebuts that position. Most serious Miltonists try to aspire to the poet’s remarkable learning, but the truths in Milton, various and liberal, are there for all to see.
Much is said of the United States having lost its way. Furthermore, the Anglo-American “special relationship” has reasserted the theme of the “white man’s burden” in its Middle Eastern and Asian policies but has been deeply compromised by the outcomes of its actions in these regions and by the response of West Europeans, Britons, and Americans to their governments. In terms appropriate to his own day but that are readily understandable and applicable in our own, Milton warned of matters of this kind and built a response to them in his poetry. Reading Milton as he should be read is one path of restitution, not of consolation but of continued and better engagement; the pages that follow suggest a way to that path. As our experience of preeminence mutates into something else, Milton’s particular treatment of loss and defeat, as well as of the complicatedness of positive potential, will be a crucial, prescient tool of reflection, a strong recommendation for the virtue of his poetry.
Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? is Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
