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Book Review

Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World

At a time when Cultural Studies is vying with English studies, this book seems to have been titled for market appeal. It should have been more accurately called International Milton Symposium 1991: a selection of papers, for that is what it is. Only eight of its 21 essays fall under "Poetry and Politics" (Part III), the others under "The Prophetic Voice" (Part I) and "Gender and Personal Identities" (Part III). As P.G. Stanwood explains in his introduction, this tripartite grouping derives from three plenary addresses at the 1991 Vancouver symposium: Louis Martz's paper on prophecy, Mary Ann Radinowicz's on gender, and Balachandra Rajan's on politics.

Martz's "Milton's Prophetic Voice: Moving Toward Paradise" opens Part I and explores parallels between the techniques of Old Testament prophets and that of Milton in some of his prose works and Paradise Lost. Pointing to the methods of Amos, Jeremiah, and especially Isaiah in shaping a "personal excursus" (7), Martz illuminates the cadenza effect of those passages in The Reason of Church Goverment, the Second Defence, and Paradise Lost in which Milton stages the emerging of his own prophetic voice. I use the term cadenza because Martz also alerts us to the auditory effects of Milton's work, particularly of his Latin writings. He stresses Milton's saturation in Latin during the years 1650-55 and the flow-on into the "great suspended cadences" of Paradise Lost (12). Martz could well have related this to another, seminally important, context: Milton's 22 years of blindness (1652-74), a way of life which was necessarily strongly aural and out of which Paradise Lost was produced.

The emphasis of this book, the editor claims, is "above all on issues of context" (xvi). The current renewal of contextual studies indeed represents English's answer to Cultural Studies. So how well do these essays deal with context, with Milton's "world"? Unevenly, although this is a weakness unavoidable with collections. Moreover, many of these essays address context only minimally, scarcely departing from textual/New Critical/classroom exegesis.

In Part I, Lee M. Johnson's "Language and the Illusion of Innocence in Paradise Lost" neither justifies its presence under "The Prophetic Voice" nor refers to Milton's world, but is a careful study of Adam and Eve's prelapsarian language with some postscript comparisons with Wordsworth. David Robertson's textual analysis, "Soliloquy and Self in Milton's Major Poems," is of a similar order. Both of these essays could have fruitfully related their subject to [End Page 149] Milton's world, specifically to seventeenth century ideas about speech and the Fall. Stella P.Revard's essay on Lycidas also appears under "The Prophetic Voice" but mentions neither prophecy nor Joseph Wittreich's authoritative work on Lycidas as prophecy; it is a contextual study in that it explores the poem as a commemorative ode in the Pindaric tradition. Looking at another context, Douglas Chambers relates Book XII of Paradise Lost to the "synoptic" art of the Renaissance, particularly tapestries. T. H. Howard-Hill offers a well supported argument against the notion constructed earlier this century that Milton was involved with contemporary drama; it is salutary to be persuaded once and for all that this was not a Miltonic context.

In the leading article of Part II ("Gender and Personal Identities"), Mary Ann Radzinowicz argues that Milton read the stories of four women of Genesis--Sarah, Lot's (unnamed) wife, Dinah, and Tamar--in such a way as to focus on sexual difference, the social relativism of gender concerns, and the application of these stories to social and political power in Milton's time. Radzinowicz draws her evidence from outlines of dramas in the Trinity manuscript and references across Milton's prose works. A general value of her study is the recognition of Milton's "respect for difference" (151) and of the varied contexts of his work, including Christian, Judaic, and classical. Relevantly placed also in Part II is Michael Wilding's "Thir sex not equal seem'd': Equality in Paradise Lost." He argues that there is no inequality between Adam and Eve in paradise but that it only seemed so to Satan. Ample evidence from the poem, however, flies in the face of this argument: that Eve is inferior to Adam is acknowledged by Eve herself (IV, 440-43, 635-37), the narrator (IV, 492-500), the archangel Raphael (VI, 908-9, VIII, 561-75) and God (X, 145-56). This does not detract from Eve's perfect partnership with Adam nor from her freedom; her relationship with Adam before the Fall is analogous to that of the angels with God--"freely we serve / Because we freely love" (V, 538-39). The interdependence of Adam and Eve in paradise, the full meaning of their "converse," is explored by Donald M. Friedman in a following essay, "Divisions on a Ground: 'Sex' in Paradise Lost."

Part III ("Poetry and Politics") opens with Balachandra Rajan writing on Milton's allusions to India and suggesting that Paradise Lost is "a poem on religion versus empire . . . the impact of which is not fully clarified until Paradise Regained, when Christ refuses the kingdoms of the world" (216). Strongly counterpointing this view is J. Martin Evans' essay on Paradise Lost as "Milton's Imperial Epic." This is the newest of these "new essays" and the most zealous exercise in New Historicism/Cultural Studies. Writing about "the collective consciousness of seventeenth-century England" (232), Evans attempts to do for Paradise Lost what Stephen Greenblatt did for Spenser's Bower of Bliss. He proposes that the figure of the colonist appears variously in Paradise Lost as Satan, Raphael, Adam and Eve, and Michael, and that the poem "not only breathes an Atlantic air but expresses in all their bewildering complexity the radically divided attitudes towards the American empire which existed in seventeenth-century English protestant culture" (238). It is an exciting prospect, and Evans admits that it is only a "prospectus" for a forthcoming book (232). At this stage his argument is not entirely convincing, not least because of the claim that "Milton's writings are liberally sprinkled with references to the colonization of the New World" (230). Where? Only one example, from Of Reformation, is given in this essay. One would really like to know: what evidence is there that Milton's contemporaries read Paradise Lost in this way? A more convincing contextual study is made by Gary D. Hamilton in "Paradise Regained and the Private Houses." He relates the publication of the poem in 1671 to the political climate surrounding the Conventicles Acts of 1664 and 1670 and interprets Milton's Jesus as a hero in the Quaker mold. Adding further to our knowledge of Milton's world, Peter Lindenbaum's essay, "The Poet in the Marketplace: Milton and Samuel Simmons," looks at Milton's business arrangements with his publishers and the conditions of book distribution. Achsah Guibbory, writing on Eikonoklastes, and Wyman H. Herendeen, in an original study of the Accedence Commenc't Grammar, contribute to our understanding of the radical Milton and to the political context of both these works.

While this book shows evidence of the healthy renaissance in contextual studies, it shows that there is still much to do. Milton's work comes out of many different cultural contexts simultaneously--elite, hegemonic, counter, marginalized. Paradise Lost is, in this sense, a multicultural text. What is needed is more analysis of the interconnectedness of the contexts within Milton's works as well as more research on the reception of Milton in the seventeenth century. Miltonists should recognize too that David Masson pioneered Cultural Studies/New Historicism in the nineteenth century. His six volumes deserve to [End Page 150] be read again closely--even William Riley Parker admitted that he only "perched like a pygmy on Masson's noble shoulders."

Beverley Sherry
University of Sydney