of the soul, is in this sense linked immediately through sublimation to the (flower) bed in which it finds itself.
But if the pressure of the passage is upward, drawing in the end from the observed tendency of spirits and steams to rise, the movement of the passage is nevertheless equally, reciprocally downward, not only because the eye follows it down the page. Milton begins with an idea—or, let’s say, an inspiration; this idea is a monistic system linking flower and beast to angel and God, drawn upward by the aspirational love of Christian piety. But the passage does its work twice, once tracing out the system of things, and again putting it in a complex image. Raphael puts it this way: when it comes to matters of universal law, of truths that “surmount … the reach / Of human sense,” Raphael’s linguistic resources are the same as the resources available to the Muse who visits Milton in his bed. Such matters, which after all evade the immediate evidence of the eye, must be “delineate[d] … / By likening spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best.” Milton captures here the basic Renaissance faith in the equivalence between the visible and invisible worlds, the way in which, as one scholar puts it, “every kind of representation … has a twofold semantic status, a literal and a transcending, tropical one.”103 The earth is “the shadow of heav’n,” and “things therein / Each to other like” (5.571–76). But he has bent this Renaissance theory of correspondence towards his own sense of a monistic plenitude. As Lana Cable puts it, speaking of Milton’s “paradoxical … commitment” at once to the affective content of sensory materials and the rhetorical exploration of concepts, “even apparently nonsensory language depends on a linguistic construct of ‘dead’ metaphor”; it is the work of Milton’s poetry and prose tracts, what Cable calls his “carnal rhetoric,” continually to rediscover and to revivify the dead metaphors that turn up, revenant-like, everywhere in Milton’s verse. Milton has, in the words of Phillip Donnely, “present[ed] his monism within the poem so that a dualist orthodox reading of the epic is still possible.”104
But this is an incomplete account of Milton’s commitment to a fully articulated monism, in much the same way that we have already seen dualist accounts fail to capture their more profound entanglements with their material models. For Milton, concepts emerge not as the abstractions of sensory impressions but as the linguistic aspirations of sensual experience; “inspiration” is the name for the spiritual fullness that kicks the process back along its reverse vector. Poetry, like Creation, runs metaphor in reverse, downward from idea to image, returning “spiritual” to “corporal.”105 This is why Milton sees fit to put his poetic system, this monism stretching from root to fragrance, matter to spirit, in the mouth of an angel. “Angel,” Locke remembers, means “messenger,” and it is Raphael that can carry inspiration back to its figures, putting the idea in words. Like Aristotle or Locke after him, Raphael turns to a more embracing metaphor to provide the explanatory framework of language itself—that is, “expression”—for what is “corporal … expression” but a bodily breathing out, a turn to carnal shapes to bear or to imply spirit? When Raphael insists that he must “liken spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best,” what is he doing but breathing out (“expressing”) what he has already breathed in (“inspired” or “aspired … spirit”)? We may better, therefore, say that Milton provides here one sense of poetry as the native articulation of a complex ecological entanglement, thinking as thinking through things, rising up from brute matter to spirit, and back from spirit back to matter via the metaphors that can best bear their angelic burden. Milton, like Raphael, transfers a series of ideas to metaphors, which repay him by being reliberated as ideas. This creative dwelling in and through a world of available images is the essential work of poetry in a cognitive ecology; inspiration is the name of its emergent apotheosis, the dazzling moment where the fullness of spirit is put back into expression. From ideas to things to ideas, inspiration to expression and back again: Milton provides a sketch of the poet at home in his poetic resources. Milton in his bed has in other words thought himself into Adam in his Eden. And “Urania,” the Muse of astronomy, is Milton’s name for spirit’s special emergent property; inspiration is the condition of the mind dwelling richly in its cognitive bed.
Exhibit 3. Mark Akenside’s Museum
We will have further opportunities to reflect on Milton’s importance to eighteenth-century theorizations of embedded cognition (see, for instance, Exhibit 14). For now, I want to remain quite local—tracing embeddedness in the word’s most mundane sense. Milton’s bed makes one more appearance in the historical register, before finally sinking from view. This is in the collection of Mark Akenside (1721–1770), a Newcastle-born physician with aspirations as a poet, who by dint of learning and hard work installed himself at the center of mid-century belles lettres.106 Collecting came naturally to Akenside. He had studied in Leiden in the high period of that city’s market for technical and scholarly books; it was possibly there that he began building his library in earnest.107 When he returned to London, he established himself as an important member of a circle of virtuosi and antiquaries who met at Tom’s coffeehouse in the Strand. He became well known to booksellers, by whom his “comments” were enough “cherished” that he was granted the privilege of reading “gratis all the modern books of any character”—and was given, according to this contemporary source, any book that “struck him with a powerful impression.”108 Partly through such gifts, Akenside became widely recognized as an important collector of antiquities and the typical objects of one sort of virtuoso collection.109 He was noted, for instance, for being a “curious collector” of prints, which he left, upon his death, to his “very intimate friend” Jeremiah Dyson.110 No catalogue of Akenside’s collection survives—it died with Dyson—so it is impossible to know how extensive his holdings might have been; he seems, however, freely to have shared it with acquaintances, one of whom remarked that it contained “capital prints from the most eminent Painters of Italy and Holland, which he illustrated [that is, described] with admirable taste.”111
Though little is known of Akenside’s sizable private museum, the interests and idiosyncrasy of his collection are suggested by a gift he received mid-career. Sometime in 1760, Thomas Hollis gave to Akenside the bed reputed formerly to have belonged to Milton, in which, if the account can be believed, Milton was visited by his Muse.112 Hollis admired Milton for his politics; he explicitly hoped that Akenside would pen a poem in the Miltonian tradition as compensation for the gift. It was a question of inspiration—and the bed was the critical mechanism. Hollis hoped that Akenside, “believing himself obliged, and having slept in that bed,” would be “inspired to compose a poem in Milton’s honor.” Unfortunately for Hollis, Akenside himself was just at that moment switching allegiances, blown by the winds of political change to the politics of the new ministry. Akenside, who reports say “seemed wonderfully delighted with the bed, and had it put up in his house,” seems therefore likely to have appreciated the bed as a legacy of a different sort.113 Certainly, speaking in a general way, the gift flattered Akenside into thinking of himself as a poet of the stature of Milton. But it also came to stand as a reminder of the formal similarities between poetry and dreaming. The terms of Hollis’s bequest make this much clear. It was a question not of politics but of poetics; Akenside dreamed of himself as the proper inheritor to Milton for sympathies between their practices as poets, not least because Akenside was working in a similar tradition of the imagination as an entangled form of memory work.
3. Title page of The Museum, ed. Mark Akenside (London: Robert Dodsley, 1746). Apollo, as a figure of poetry, is seated between his inspiration and his messenger. Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections.
Akenside got his break in the world of literature roughly a decade before Hollis’s gift. This was when he was named editor of Robert Dodsley’s The Museum: Or, the Literary and Historical Register. Dodsley was a friend to the circles of collectors and writers that included Akenside; his own literary tastes likewise leaned toward descriptions of collections. As one of his first literary works, Dodsley penned a one-act farce on the contents of a toyshop;
