John Milton (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

367 Pages·2004·2.54 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom (Editor)

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
JOHN MILTON
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
©2004 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.
Introduction © 2004 by Harold Bloom.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
John Milton / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-7657-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 0-7910-7824-8
(pbk.) 1. Milton, John, 1608-1674—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.
PR3588.J653 2003b
821’.4—dc22
2003016890
Chelsea House Publishers
1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400
Broomall, PA 19008-0914
http://www.chelseahouse.com
Contributing Editor: Brett Foster
Cover designed by Terry Mallon
Cover photo: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Milton’s Minor Poems 23
F.T. Prince
Heaven 33
William Empson
Milton 55
Thomas Greene
The Transcendental Masque 97
Angus Fletcher
Echo Schematic 109
John Hollander
Milton: “Lycidas” 121
Peter M. Sacks
The Majesty of Darkness 151
William Flesch
The genesis of gendered subjectivity in the divorce
tracts and in Paradise Lost 171
Mary Nyquist
The father’s house: Samson Agonistes
in its historical moment 203
John Guillory
vi CONTENTS
Milton’s Prose: The Adjustment of Idealism 235
C.A. Patrides
Aristotle on the Pinnacle: Paradise Regained
and the Limits of Theory 261
Price McMurray
The Birth of the Author: Milton’s Poetic
Self-Construction 275
J. Martin Evans
Gently Raised 295
Stanley Fish
“Something ... Written to Aftertimes” 319
Barbara K. Lewalski
Chronology 331
Contributors 333
Bibliography 337
Acknowledgments 345
Index 347
Editor’s Note
My Introduction is in two parts, the first reviewing the High Romantic
reading of Paradise Lost, and the second an account of Milton’s troping of his
precursors, so as to render them belated, and the poet of the Satanic epic (as
Neil Forsyth calls it) sublimely early.
The poet-scholar, F.T. Prince, much missed by me, gives a sensitive
and learned account of the Italian elements in Milton’s Minor Poems, while
the great William Empson fiercely assaults the dubious figure called “God”
in Paradise Lost.
A great Renaissance scholar, the recently departed Thomas Greene,
subtly locates the place of Paradise Lost in the epic sequence of angelic
descents.
Two dazzling Orphic critics, who study allegorizing and allusiveness,
Angus Fletcher and John Hollander, examine the role of echo in Comusand
Paradise Lost, respectively.
Peter M. Sacks illuminates Lycidas, the strongest shorter poem in the
language, by bringing together Freud and elegiac tradition.
In a superb essay, William Flesch keeps to a sophisticated version of the
Romantic interpretation, rightly saying of the heroic Milton that he had the
power to refuse “the safest way.”
Provocatively, Mary Nyquist suggests that Eve’s story takes priority
over Adam’s because of intimations offered by Milton in his divorce tracts.
John Guillory, with true originality, finds Milton’s relation to his own
father to be postfigured in the power of Samson Agonistes.
The heroic pattern of Milton’s prose is traced by C.A. Patrides, after
which Price McMurray celebrates the counter-sublimity of Paradise Regained.
Milton’s Incarnation of the Poetical Character is analyzed by J. Martin
Evans, while the essential Stanley Fish shows us action and risk fusing in
Milton’s unique splendor.
vii
In her radiant epilogue to her biography of Milton, the best ever
published, Barbara K. Lewalski reminds us that the extraordinary strength of
the greatest poet in the language, after Chaucer and Shakespeare, resists the
reductions of all the modes of our current criticism.
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
By 1652, before his forty-fourth birthday and with his long-projected major
poem unwritten, Milton was completely blind. In 1660, with arrangements
for the Stuart Restoration well under way, the blind poet identified himself
with the prophet Jeremiah, as if he would “tell the very soil itself what her
perverse inhabitants are deaf to,” vainly warning a divinely chosen people
“now choosing them a captain back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little,
and consider whither they are rushing.” These words are quoted from the
second edition of The Ready and Easy Way, a work which marks the end of
Milton’s temporal prophecy and the beginning of his greater work, the
impassioned meditations upon divine providence and human nature. In these
[meditations] Milton abandons the field of his defeat, and leaves behind him
also the songs of triumph he might have sung in praise of a reformed society
and its imaginatively integrated citizens. He changes those notes to tragic,
and praises, when he praises at all, what he calls the better fortitude of
patience, the hitherto unsung theme of Heroic Martyrdom. Adam, Christ
and Samson manifest an internal mode of heroism that Satan can neither
understand nor overcome, a heroism that the blind Puritan prophet himself
is called upon to exemplify in the England of the Restoration.
Milton had planned a major poem since he was a young man, and he
had associated his composition of the poem with the hope that it would be a
celebration of a Puritan reformation of all England. He had prophesied of
the coming time that “amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of the saints some
one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measures
to sing and celebrate thy divine mercies and marvellous judgements in the
land throughout all ages.” This vision clearly concerns a national epic, very
probably on a British rather than a Biblical theme. That poem, had it been
written, would have rivaled the great poem of Milton’s master, Spenser, who
in a profound sense was Milton’s “Original,” to cite Dryden’s testimony.
Paradise Lost is not the poem that Milton had prophesied in the exuberance
Part of this introduction first appeared as “Milton and His Precursors” in A Map of Misreading.
copyright © 1975 by Oxford University Press.
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