8 - John Milton

Summary

For a variety of reasons, Milton has acquired over the years a somewhat intimidating reputation as a poet. Thanks largely to his association with Puritanism, he is often thought to be a grim, humourless, unfeeling religious zealot, remote from the joys and sorrows of everyday human experience. In fact, although he could certainly sound as fierce and uncompromising as any hell-fire preacher, he could also be as sensuous as Keats, as passionate as Shakespeare, as rapturous as Gerard Manley Hopkins, and as playful as Donne. Of all our non-dramatic poets he is perhaps the most various, the most fully and richly human.

Yet beneath this bewildering variety of voices and moods there is one characteristic that seems to me to be quintessentially Miltonic: the poet’s contrariness. From the very beginning of his career, Milton evidently delighted in pitting one set of values or beliefs against another. An extraordinary number of his poems, that is to say, consist essentially of two antithetical movements based on diametrically opposed premises. In the opening stanzas of his first original English poem, ‘ On the Death of a Fair Infant’, for instance, the speaker assumes (a) that the child is dead, (b) that she was human, and (c) that her fate was caused by the descent of a pagan divinity:

O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted,

Soft silken primrose, fading timelessly,

Summer’s chief honour if thou hadst outlasted

Bleak Winter’s force that made thy blossom dry;

For he being amorous on that lovely dye,

That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss

But killed alas, and then bewailed his fatal bliss.