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Book Review

The Miltonic Moment

At a cursory glance, J. Marin Evans's scholarly output on Milton resembles the poetic career of his subject: a brief, yet promising early yield with Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) and an edition of Paradise Lost, IX and X, for Cambridge Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), followed by a long period of relative abeyance in which his only published book was a monograph on Lycidas (1983), culminating in renewed intensity nearly thirty years later with Milton's Imperial Epic (Ithica: Cornell UP,1996) and most recently The Miltonic Moment. However, in keeping with this anal ogy, the richness of his work since his return suggests that he spent the interim years neglecting his scholarly vocation about as much as Paradise Lost suggests that the years of Milton's own hiatus from poetry were squandered. Evans's penultimate work is impressive precisely because it recognizes contemporary discourses on colonialism as a context for understanding the epic without reducing it to a discourse on imperialism. His most recent work focuses this balanced, judicious approach on Milton's primary early works: On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, A Mask performed at Ludlow Castle, and Lycidas. For Evans, the term "Miltonic Moment" designates the "decisive instance" or "a moment of crisis" within a recurring structure of transformation he finds throughout these and all Milton's poetry "that takes place immediately before the plot undergoes a dramatic change of course"(2). Because it bridges the transitional space between "a past that is about to be superseded and repudiated" and a "future that will begin to unfold as soon as the poem is over," the Miltonic Moment is imbued simultaneously with sense of presentness and intermediacy (2). Evans's purpose is to define the particular shape of this process as it manifests itself in early works then to relate it to the immediate conditions of both Milton's own life and his particular cultural "moment." The new readings Evans's study generates as he works through critical problems makes The Miltonic Moment a particularly timely addition to the study of Milton.

The concept that Milton's poems take place at the transitional moment separating two momentous events provides Evans with a broad compass within which he can inscribe the particular transforma-tional process as it occurs in these three distinctive poems. The first chapter "The Poetry of Absence," argues that the Nativity Ode takes place in the moment between the departure of the pagan deities and the event that would ultimately usher in the "age of Gold." Evans views the expulsion of the deities defining the poem's "moment" as part of a general pattern in which all "intermediaries" standing between the reader and the event celebrated in the Ode are removed(16). Disputing inveterate under-standing of the poem as an account of Milton's personal conversion, Evans argues that, through this removal, the Ode "performs" an act of conversion, not only on its readers, but also on its classical source of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue which it "regenerates" in terms of Puritan theology. To convert Virgil's eclogue, Milton's Ode enacts strategies of inclusion and exclusion which resemble those enacted by and against seventeenth-century Puritans. Evans points out, however, that these opposing strategies seem to entail a contradiction--one which he resolves by explaining how contradictions of regeneration are inherent in the paradoxical idea of Christian conversion itself, which in Augustinian terms asserts the continuity and absolute disjunction between the "old" and "new man" of God.

Continuing with the idea of the Miltonic moment as contradiction, the second chapter, "Virtue and Virginity," examines what Evans believes is an often overlooked textual crux in Comus's conception of sexual "virtue"--that the masque simultaneously recommends both "temperance" (sex sanctioned within marriage) and virginity (absolute abstinence). Evans resolves this contradiction by appealing to the textual history of the masque itself, which, he holds, "[b]etween 1634-1637 . . . passed through a prolonged Miltonic moment, during the course of which it was fundamentally transformed" (40). He [End Page 126] argues that the Bridgewater manuscript, the "presentation copy of the text actually performed at Ludlow," contains references only to temperance. Milton, therefore, did not add the Lady's recommendation of the "sage and serious doctrine of Virginity" until later. Evans explains the poem's shift in focus from temperance to virginity in Comus as Milton's rejection of the Aristotelian "doctrine of the mean," which, he asserts in Of Reformation, does not apply to the idea of Christian "virtue." In Comus, as in so many other poems, true virtue comes to reside at last in privation.

"The Road from Horton" reads the transformational process in Lycidas as a proleptic account of Milton's private transformation from "the retiring, young, virgin poet of Horton into the publicly outspoken, thrice-married polemicist of Westminster" (72). To arrive at this biographical interpretation, Evans first reads Lycidas as Milton's rejection of the classical elegiac traditions of Theocritus's first Idyl and Virgil's tenth Eclogue on which it is based. For Evans, this dissociative gesture echoes Milton's own movement from historical identification with to disengagement from the "uncouth swain," a gesture which he believes is solidified by Milton's ultimate identification with the speaker who enters at the concluding ottava rima. Evans believes this disen gagement happens at the moment the speaker begins lamenting poetry's failure "to perform its consolatory office" (103). Milton is renouncing the retired poetic vocation he once shared with Edward King.

The recognition of these transformational patterns within the poems itself constitutes a significant contribution to the study of Milton. Overall, it provides a valid way of seeing structural continuity among Milton's poems that reminds us that they are as much the "products of a literary intelligence" as they are of "particular religious and political juncture in the history of seventeenth-century England" (x).Yet, the foregoing synopsis hardly does justice to the real strength of Evans's work, a strength which resides in his facility for determining how classical allusions inform meaning for the poems as a whole and critical moments in them. We see a prime example of this proficiency in his extensive disquisition on the significance of the Orpheus myth from Ovid and Milton's contemporaries to help explain how the shepherd's evocation of the lament "Universal Nature" does not point up inevitability of death, only its injustice--a point contributing to the poem's overall paradox, that it is a poem about the failure of poetry to deliver on what it promises (84-92).

The nicety of detail that gives the weight of credibility to his discussion of the intertextual resonances in Milton's poems seem less convincing when Evans uses biography to substantiate his readings. The possible limits of this method are most clear when Evans reads the end of Lycidas as a renunciation of the elegiac form which "foreshadows Milton's decision to shelve his poetic career" (114). To read the elegy in this way overlooks a critical irony implicit in the relationship between the elegy's form and content. The paradoxical circularity of a poem about the inefficacy of poetry to deliver on its promises-of an elegy skeptical of elegies-comes across as playful as it does is pointed. To seek a biographical impetus for such paradoxes discloses a general predisposition towards reading Milton's poetry merely as a versified extension of his prose polemics. I do not , however, want to suggest that this tendency devalues The Miltonic Moment on the whole. Nor do I wish to represent Evan's as a biographical critic. In fact, that Evans reads the Nativity Ode as "the most rigorously depersonalized of all Milton's nondramatic works" shows that he is not necessarily partial to biographical approaches (12). Yes, Evans does ultimately posit historical determinants such as Chalres I's dissolution of Parliament behind the sense of intermediacy defining Milton's early works (7). However, so much of Evans's attention is focused on defining the nuanced manner in which the Miltonic moment is manifested in each of the poems and on sifting through classical references to work out their critical problems that even if one does not agree with his conclusions about the relation between the poems and Milton's culture and life, one may be too caught up in the rich interpretations themselves to notice.

James Wells
Ohio University