The civil war of the seventeenth century, in which Milton is a symbolic figure, has never been concluded. … Of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions, conscious and unconscious, inherited or acquired, making an unlawful entry.
T. S. Eliot, Milton (1947), p. 3
Milton is a more controversial figure than any other English poet. Many of the controversies relate to Milton’s participation in the seventeenth-century English Revolution, yet Milton is more controversial even than that Revolution itself. Those who dislike Milton dislike him very much indeed, on personal as well as political grounds. How could the American who proclaimed himself Royalist, Anglo-Catholic and classicist have any use for England’s greatest republican anti-Catholic? Blake, Shelley and Herzen were more attuned to Milton: so were Jefferson, Mirabeau and the Chartists.
Yet the controversies around Milton are not simple. He was, for instance, a propagandist of revolution, a defender of regicide and of the English republic. Dr. Johnson and many since have found it hard to forgive him for this, or to be fair to him. Yet Milton frequently expressed great contempt for the common people, and so cannot be whole-heartedly admired by modern democrats. He was a passionate anti-clerical, and in theology a very radical heretic. Since he was also a great Christian poet, ‘orthodox’ critics have frequently tried to explain away, or to deny, his heresies. We may feel that these attempts tell us more about the commentators than about Milton, but they have not been uninfluential. On the other hand, Milton’s radical theology is far from conforming to the sensibility of twentieth-century liberal Christians.
The popular image of Milton is of a sour Puritan, an arrogant and hypocritical male chauvinist who ill-treated his own wife and daughters. But his contemporaries denounced him as a libertine who encouraged the insubordination of women, as an advocate of ‘divorce at pleasure’ and polygamy. Milton has been criticized for approaching serious political and social problems from a totally personal angle – for writing about divorce only after his own marriage had broken down, about liberty of printing only after he had himself run into trouble with would-be censors; for attacking in an unbalanced way the leaders of the Long Parliament (in the ‘digression’ to his History of Britain) because he himself had had difficulties with some of that Parliament’s committees. A similar accusation of making political issues out of personal problems was made against the Leveller leader John Lilburne. Even if the charge is true, the ideas still remain to be judged on their merits.
Although Milton was a considerable scholar, and classicist enough to satisfy T. S. Eliot, he offends many readers by his apparent rejection of all human learning in Paradise Regained and the De Doctrina Christiana. Stylistically, he is accused of writing an old-fashioned prose, lacking in simplicity and directness; and verse in a style which (because of its alleged Latinisms and grandiloquence)1 proved a deplorable model and is to blame for the artificial eighteenth-century ‘poetic diction’. His great reputation was thus a disaster for English literature. Milton has been regarded as playing a big part in the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which is said to have taken place in seventeenth-century England; critics have wagged fingers at him for not being Shakespeare or for not being a metaphysical poet.
For all these reasons – and no doubt for many more – a determined attempt was made not so long ago to demote Milton, to remove him from the canon. We forget to-day how near it came to success. ‘Milton’s dislodgment, in the past decade, after his two centuries of predominance, was effected with remarkably little fuss.’ So F. R. Leavis wrote, triumphantly if prematurely, in 1936.2 In 1956 the volume of the Penguin Guide to English Literature which succeeded The Age of Chaucer and The Age of Shakespeare was not called The Age of Milton but From Donne to Marvell. The chapter devoted to ‘Milton’s religious verse’ was not enthusiastic.
As late as 1968 W. R. Parker wrote ‘after having disliked Milton’s ideas for three centuries, while admiring his poetry, the English have finally decided … that the poetry too is bad’3 – a statement even more astonishing for what it says about the countrymen of Blake and Shelley, Wordsworth and the Chartists, than for its finality about the present. It is historically quite untrue, but indicative of the success of the propaganda of those whom William Empson calls the ‘neo-Christians’. Fortunately these were not united in their strategy. Over against those who tried to dismiss Milton were others, less politically shrewd perhaps, who with C. S. Lewis at their head believed that they could annex Milton for ‘orthodoxy’. In Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) the poet is represented as a traditional authoritarian who can be used to rebuke the sinful modern world. Eliot himself on second thoughts joined in the game of salvaging as much of Milton as possible for ‘orthodoxy’. It was part of a movement, now one hopes defunct, which saw Shakespeare as a propagandist of something called ‘Christian humanism’, defender of a hierarchical society, and Milton as the product of ‘the Christian tradition’.
It is, in my view, quite wrong to see Milton in relation to anything so vague and generalized as ‘the Christian tradition’. He was a radical Protestant heretic. He rejected Catholicism as anti-Christian: the papist was the only heretic excluded from his wide tolerance. Milton shed far more of mediaeval Catholicism than did the Church of England. His great theological system, the De Doctrina Christiana, arose by a divorcing command from the ambiguous chaos of traditional Christianity.1 Milton rejected the Trinity, infant baptism and most of the traditional ceremonies, including church marriage; he queried monogamy and believed that the soul died with the body. He cannot reasonably be claimed as ‘orthodox’.
Demotion is now impossible. Since Christopher Ricks’s Milton’s Grand Style (1963) routed the Leavisites, Milton’s poetical reputation stands to-day as high as ever. Yet Milton needs to be defended from his defenders almost more than from the declining band of his enemies. There is the immensely productive Milton industry, largely in the United States of America, a great part of whose vast output appears to be concerned less with what Milton wrote (still less with enjoyment of what Milton wrote) than with the views of Professor Blank on the views of Professor Schrank on the views of Professor Rank on what Milton may or may not have written. Milton has been described as ‘the poet of scholars and academic critics’ – no longer either a people’s poet or a poet’s poet.2 What a fate for the arch-enemy of academic pedantry: better dead than buried alive, surely!
Yet how far is Milton read with enjoyment by ordinary people? On the one hand there are those who would persuade us that we must swallow Milton’s theology whole if we are to appreciate his poetry; on the other are those who, in the hope of getting the young to read him, tell us that we must forget that he was a ‘Puritan’ and a classical scholar, things which no one can take seriously in the late twentieth century. We must somehow let the poetry speak to us directly, and then all will be well.1 I applaud the intention, but I doubt whether it will succeed, at any rate with the major poems. Milton was not just a fine writer. He is the greatest English revolutionary who is also a poet, the greatest English poet who is also a revolutionary. The poems will not speak for themselves unless we understand his ideas in their context. But the context is historical, and it is very difficult to grasp Milton’s ideas without placing them in relation to those of his contemporaries. That is what I try to do in this book.
It is not then a straightforward biography of Milton. I am arguing a case, and attempting to refute traditional interpretations and assumptions where they appear to conflict with this case. So I must begin by declaring my hand. I believe that Milton’s ideas were more directly influenced than is usually recognized by the events of the English Revolution in which he was an active participant: and that the influences brought to bear on him were much more radical than has been accepted. Some minimum understanding of the world in which Milton acted and wrote is, I think, necessary if we are to appreciate what his poetry is doing.
A long time ago Milton used
