Chris Joyce

That the Darkness Visible website should be so-named is a piece of good luck for anyone wishing to explore the ‘Milton Controversy’. ‘What controversy?’ some readers may ask, assuming that Milton’s high standing in the canon has always been tacitly accepted. But the truth is that Milton has always been controversial on grounds ranging from technical aspects of his poetry to his illiberal views on women (asked why he did not teach his daughters Latin, as he required them to take it down from his dictation, he replied, ‘One tongue is enough for a woman’). As we shall see in what follows, Milton’s literary reception over the centuries has not always been a matter of unquestioning acceptance. His critics (some of whom have themselves been notable literary figures) have argued that the sound (or ‘music’) of Milton’s verse predominates over its sense.  Others have felt that its Latinate syntax and diction take the place of ‘authentic’ English (exemplified at its finest in Shakespeare). Some have asked whether Milton understood the difficulty of his undertaking in elaborating at length the brief exposition of the original myth in Genesis.  And there have been those who simply disliked his character and ideological outlook.

Consider the following response to this site’s eponymous phrase from an influential later poet and critic, T.S. Eliot: 

I am not too happy with eyes that both blaze and sparkle, unless Milton meant us to imagine a roaring fire ejecting sparks: and that is too fiery an image for even supernatural eyes. The fact that the lake was burning somewhat diminishes the effect of the fiery eyes; and it is difficult to imagine a burning lake in a scene where there was only darkness visible. (‘A Note on the Verse of John Milton’, 1936)

We will return to Eliot later. Among Milton’s more severe critics (not only concerning his views on women and how to divorce them) was the magisterial Dr Johnson. These sentiments may find an echo in many a weary student’s heart:

Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions. (Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 1783)

Of course, Johnson, a foundational Tory, found himself politically out of sympathy with Milton, the ‘acrimonious and surly republican’ whose rebelliousness, he opined, stemmed from petulance and pride, ‘for he hated all whom he was required to obey’. His self-aggrandising and domineering character was equally offensive to Johnson. In domestic relations he was ‘severe and arbitrary’ with a contempt of females ‘as subordinate and inferior beings’. When his first wife left him and declined to answer his letters, ‘Milton soon decided to repudiate her for disobedience, and being one who could easily find arguments to justify inclination, published The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.’ All these facets would have a bearing on Johnson’s estimation of Paradise Lost.

But Dr Johnson was a man of the eighteenth century—in fact, one of the finest exponents of its temper and ethos, and we must view his criticisms of Milton in this light. To illustrate this, let’s briefly turn to these lines from Lycidas:

We drove a field, and both together heard

What time the grey fly winds her sultry horn

Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night

Johnson could not accept this kind of poeticising as metaphorical, or even fanciful, because 

We know that [Milton and his addressee in Lycidas, Edward King] never drove a field, and that they had no flocks to batten; and though it may be allowed that the representation may be allegorical, the true meaning is so uncertain and remote, that it is never sought because it cannot be known when it is found.

He adds for good measure: ‘Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known its author.’ Whatever may be the justice or injustice of such remarks, Johnson raises an important question as to how far authors’ reputations colour the perception of their work. But his approach is balanced overall, recognising the extent of Milton’s literary scholarship, his masterly knowledge of Latin models, and the poetic grandeur of Paradise Lost, even if the impossible poetic project of ‘justify[ing] the ways of God to men’ led to inevitable failures. 

There is general agreement that Milton’s influence is readily discernible in many later poets; but the supposed ‘Miltonising’ vein is not always easy to put a finger on. It is here, I think, in this stanza from the eighteenth-century poet William Collins’ rather beautiful ‘Ode to Evening’:

Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake

Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile

Or upland fallows grey

Reflect its last cool gleam.

But when chill blust’ring winds, or driving rain,

Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut

That from the mountain’s side

Views wilds, and swelling floods,

And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires,

And hears their simple bell, and marks o’er all

Thy dewy fingers draw

The gradual dusky veil.

The works of Collins and his peers such as James Thomson (poet of The Seasons) are redolent of the ‘beauties’ of, for example, Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and, here, ‘Il Penseroso’: 

            And the waters murmuring

With such consort as they keep,

Entice the dewy-feather’d sleep;

And let some strange mysterious dream,

Wave at his wings, in airy stream

Of lively portraiture display’d,

Softly on my eye-lids laid.

And as I wake, sweet music breathe

Above, about, or underneath,

Sent by some spirit to mortals good,

Or th’ unseen Genius of the wood.

In these poets we sometimes find the Latinate diction, inversions and syntax of Paradise Lost. But the influence is more to be found in timbre and poetic evocation – meditative and pastoral – rather than in any overt borrowings. Something of Milton is evident also in Wordsworth’s early verse, in Shelley, and very clearly in Keats:

I have given up ‘Hyperion’ – there were too many Miltonic inversions in it – Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. … It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from ‘Hyperion’ and put a mark + to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one // to the true voice of feeling. (Letter to J.H. Reynolds, 22 September 1819)

I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but as the verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone. … Paradise Lost, though fine in itself, is a corruption of our language … a beautiful and grand curiosity. (Letter to his brother George, 21 September 1819)

These passages are quoted by John Middleton Murry (‘The Problem of Keats’ in Aspects of Literature, 1920), who is hardly remembered now but was then one of the most highly regarded critic-scholars of the time, and significantly shaped the ‘Milton Controversy’ – so much so that E. M. W. Tillyard was provoked eventually to retaliate in The Miltonic Setting (1938). Here are a couple of examples from his chapter ‘Keats and Milton’:

If Mr Tillyard does not feel this difference [in ‘feeling-tone’ between Milton and Keats], there is no common ground between us. ‘Mr Murry’, he says, ‘really must not be allowed to confine the great generalities of human feeling to the kind of man he happens to prefer…’ Mr Tillyard’s phrase ‘the great generalities of human feeling’, conceals the rather deep gulf that divides us. For precisely what I was concerned to elucidate in Keats was a great particularity of feeling. To Milton the phrase, ‘the great generalities of human feeling’, seems to me apt … but hardly at all to Keats.

What I did not notice at the time I wrote Keats and Shakespeare was that [in a letter to Reynolds of 25 August 1819] Keats half-consciously identifies himself not merely with Milton … but with Milton’s Satan. ‘The more I know what my diligence may in time effect, the more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinacy.’ 

The phrase comes from Paradise Lost 1.571-2, where Satan reviews his host:

And now his heart

Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength

Glories

Keats’ use of the phrase recalls Blake’s memorable identification of Satan with Milton, who was ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. 

Jumping ahead, we find Milton’s influence pronounced in Tennyson also (who had an obsession with Latin metres), but somewhat nebulously. Here is an example of his blank verse:

He heard the deep behind him, and a cry

Before. His own thought drove him like a goad.

Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves

And barren chasms, and all to left and right

The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based

His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang

Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—

And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,

And the long glories of the winter moon… (from ‘Morte d’Arthur’)

Note his love of alliteration, and of assonance especially: ‘lo! the level lake …the long glories of the winter moon.’ But, travelling forward from the late Victorian and Georgian eras, we come in due course to this: 

Milton’s dislodgement, in the past decade, after his two centuries of predominance, was effected with remarkably little fuss. The irresistible argument was Mr Eliot’s creative achievement; it gave his few critical asides … their finality and made it unnecessary to elaborate a case.

This is F. R. Leavis in ‘Milton’s Verse’ (1933). It made hackles rise. Worse still, Eliot ‘recanted’ his earlier views in a British Academy lecture of 1947: 

The emphasis is on the sound, not the vision, upon the word, not the idea; and in the end it is the unique versification that is the most certain sign of Milton’s intellectual mastership.

The scholar is more concerned with the understanding of the masterpiece in the environment … in which that author lived, the temper of his age, his intellectual formation … The practitioner is concerned less with the author than … with the poem in relation to his own age. He asks: Of what use is the poetry … to poets writing today? Is it … a living a force in poetry still unwritten? So we may say that the scholar’s interest is in the permanent, the practitioner’s in the immediate. The scholar can teach us where we should bestow our admiration and respect: the practitioner should be able … to make an old masterpiece actual …

And it must be said that … when he violates the English language he is imitating nobody, and he is inimitable. But Milton does … represent poetry at the extreme limit from prose.

Leavis stuck to his guns, arguing that Eliot’s ‘recantation’ was specious, performed by sleight of hand. He had seen in Eliot an ally, especially in relation to the ‘unrealised’ nature of Milton’s imagery. Of the scholars to whom Eliot ‘exhibited deference’ he writes:

No doubt their learning sometimes has relevance to the understanding and judgement of Milton’s poems … No doubt, too, there is knowledge that a critic must have in order to understand and judge. It is possible to argue plausibly that in such a case as Milton’s the enabling knowledge will be very extensive. But nothing is plainer to me than that the learning of the scholars to whom Mr Eliot defers has not, in fact, enabled. (Republished in The Common Pursuit, 1952)

No-one could accuse Leavis of not having given the necessary attention to Milton. While in York in 1915 at a Friends’ Ambulance Unit training centre he had bought a copy of Milton’s English Poems before going out to France. The rhythms of Paradise Lost, he declared, were the only ones capable of standing up to heavy gunfire. (He had the book still, mud- and blood-spattered, at the end of his life.)

The first half of the last century, then, witnessed a storm of conflicting views, some – but not all – from a distinctly religious stance:

• T. S. Eliot (Anglo-Catholic) – as cited 
• William Empson (Atheist) - Milton's God (1961)
• F. R. Leavis (Agnostic) – as cited
• C. S. Lewis (Anglican) – The Personal Heresy (1934-36), A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)
• E. M. W. Tillyard (‘Liberal-Agnostic’ but from a Presbyterian background) – Milton (1930), The   Miltonic Setting (1938)
• Basil Willey (Nonconformist/Anglican) – The Seventeenth Century Background (1934)

Two dedicated Miltonists, Tillyard and C. S. Lewis, were driven to quarrel. It began with Milton (1930) where Tillyard argued that poetry reveals the poet’s inner state. In reading Paradise Lost we are not reading about Satan and the other ‘characters’ but looking into Milton’s own personality and psychological makeup. Great poets help us to inhabit their consciousness. Lewis coined the term ‘Personal Heresy’ for this approach, which he believed shifted focus away from the text and towards speculative spiritual biography. Our effort should be to recognise and appreciate the true subject of the poem, not to speculate about the poet’s internal state when he wrote it. It is ‘uncivil’ to ignore the poem itself and discuss instead what it ‘really meant’.

Many of the arguments by Miltonists and ‘anti-Miltonists’ alike were appraised in A. J. A. Waldock’s Paradise Lost and its Critics (1947). While remaining an avowed Miltonist, Waldock takes apart the passages on the nature of Hell (1.48-241) and Milton’s inability to achieve consistency or credibility:

While Milton desires to make his Hell impressive as a place of punishment … he also desired, somewhat inconsistently, to cram it as full as he possibly could with human interest. This was good for the poem … But what in the meantime happens to Hell as such? It is obvious that as the conclave proceeds, Hell has as good as vanished. The livid flames become mere torches … A little later … Milton recollects his duty, resumes his account of the infernal landscape and adds further items to his (somewhat meagre) list of tortures… The plain fact of it is … that Milton’s Hell is very much a nominal one.

And so we return to the problem of ‘darkness visible’.

Special mention must be made of Empson’s savage critique in Milton’s God (1961)—not of Milton but, to Empson’s mind, the horrific nature of Christianity itself. Satan’s rebellion is a calculated response to the Christian God’s brutal tyranny. Milton, a rebel against authority himself, makes Satan the true hero of the poem. We might find here an echo of the passage from Waldock quoted above. But if Empson’s account is plausible, how can it be reconciled with Milton’s professed wish to justify the ways of God to men?

There is immeasurably more to say about the storms that have raged around Paradise Lost (see, for example, Christopher Ricks’ masterly study Milton’s Grand Style, 1963). But dedicated Milton students may now feel more enabled and resolved to make or revise their own valuations of this extraordinary work: an ‘epic’ poem which has remained continuously in print since its author gave it to the world in 1667.