Milton's Selected Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Biblical Sources, Criticism – Edited by Jason P. Rosenblatt

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REVIEWS

Abraham Stoll. Milton and Monotheism. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2009.xii + 377pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-8207-0410-4. $62.00 (cloth).

John Rumrich

With the title Milton and Monotheism, Abraham Stoll alludes to Freud’s Mosesand Monotheism (1939), a strangely speculative religious and cultural psychohistoryby the then eighty-year old atheist and father of psychoanalysis—who wrote it as arecent fugitive from the Nazis and a sufferer of the painful aftermath of cancer ofthe jaw. Freud never abandoned atheism, but this his final published work departsfrom earlier dismissals of religion as a nostalgic illusion. Moses and Monotheism caneven be construed as a justification of religion, or at least of Jewish monotheisticreligion with its emphasis on introspective intellectual apprehension of an unseendeity and a corresponding renunciation of sensory indulgence in multiple gods fash-ioned out of metal or wood. Stoll’s evocation of Freud’s last title in a study ofMilton is thus apt partly because the epic poet also somehow managed to escapedeadly persecution and as he composed also suffered disability and discomfort. Butmore to the point, the God of Milton’s epic theodicy is the same God who inFreud’s understanding became a crucial engine of modernity by nurturing thecapacity for inwardness and intellectual investment in that which lies beyond exter-nal representation.

Freud’s fellow Austrian and younger contemporary, Ludwig Wittgenstein,observed in the solemn (at least as translated) ultimate proposition of his TractatusLogico-Philosophicus, “whereof we cannot speak thereof we must be silent.” “Themonotheistic ideal,” as Stoll defines it, suits well with Wittgenstein’s philosophy, by“pushing toward an extreme minimalism in representation and ontology” (9). Yet,paradoxically, no God seems to have inspired more representational art and litera-ture than the unspeakable God of Moses. Following Freud, Stoll terms the cleav-age between the insistence on inexpressibility of the monotheistic ideal and theseemingly compulsive representations of monotheistic religious art—such as thetheological narrative that Milton composes—“the Mosaic distinction.” Milton’smonotheistic epic lives along this border, in a narrative that pure adherence to themonotheistic ideal would reject. Freud traces the nearly paradoxical rejection andyet embrace of representation to the very origin of Judaism, which he took tobe a mashup of a vividly jealous, local mountain God worshiped by nomadicHebrews and an abstract, strictly monotheistic, universal Egyptian deity. InMilton’s rendition, the one and only, ultimately unknowable, supreme Godbegets a Son, creates legions of angelic gods, and variously substantiatesmany other godlike creatures who serve as a means to apprehend his un-knowable deity. Stoll argues that the seventeenth century saw the develop-

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ment of a discourse of monotheism because it also saw the birth of thediscourse of polytheism that monotheism could comprehend as a devotionalinstrumentality.

One strength of Stoll’s presentation, and there are many, is that although itis a big-idea book that locates Milton in a historical-theological continuum,it makes its argument through detailed knowledge and citation of pertinentseventeenth-century writings as well as precise and illuminating close reading ofMilton’s poetry—virtues not always present in big-idea books, especially those thatcontrive to make Milton critical in some way to the development of modernity.Stoll’s extensive treatment of the stories Adam tells Raphael, for example, with theircompelling allusions to Genesis 18, is illuminating, stimulating, and exact. Milton’sparticipation in the mutually constitutive discourses of polytheism and monotheismis further contextualized by Stoll with richly informed citations of the comparativeand evaluative accounts of middle-eastern religions found in John Selden, SamuelPurchas, Gerardus Vossius, Herbert of Cherbury, and Henry More, along with thepoetry and poetics of Tasso, Spenser, Cowley, and Davenant. In making his case forMilton’s critical place in what he takes to be the development of the monotheisticideal toward the God of deism, Stoll also cites, in service of an incremental andcumulative demonstration rather than ostentation of learning, a wide array offamiliar and not-so-familiar thinkers and poets of the Augustan era, from JohnDryden, Daniel Defoe, and Alexander Pope to Charles Leslie, Anthony Collins,and John Dennis.

These Augustan writers are mostly cited in Chapter 4, “The War in Heavenand Deism,” Stoll’s most extensive illustration of Milton’s treatment of theincompatibility and yet mutual dependence of monotheism and narrative. Ashe observes, God’s perfections render ultimately meaningless any narrative of eventsthat depends on the significant actions of characters other than God. Yet suchnarrative is required as a means of divine revelation, or, as Stoll puts it, “theomniscience and omnipotence of the absolutely transcendent God . . . deny thepossibility of narrative, but simultaneously depend upon it” (151). Stanley Fishlong ago recognized in a precedent argument that Book 6, at once sublime andbathetic with its inconsequential but nonetheless grand and busy angels, rendersthis cleavage most starkly apparent. Stoll elaborates and contextualizes this cleav-age to make his claim that Milton, per Toland’s implicit suggestion, was an inci-pient deist, “of the deists’ party, although perhaps without knowing it” (182). Andtwinned with deism, at least in seventeenth-century controversy is Socinianism,to which Stoll turns in subsequent chapters. (Stoll does not acknowledge,however, that when some of Milton’s early readers, like Defoe, for example, put alabel on the apparent antitrinitarianism of Paradise Lost, Arian, not Socinian, is theterm they generally use, despite the greater controversial currency of the latterheresy.)

Students of Milton interested in his significance in modern intellectual historyand especially seventeenth-century theology as a nursery of modernity, should findStoll’s fine work useful and stimulating even if they view his overarching thesis withskepticism. It is a book that leaves me feeling obliged and grateful for ProfessorStoll’s intelligent, extensive, and informative labor.

University ofTexas at Austin

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© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Christine Rees. Johnson’s Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. xiii +296pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-521-19279-8. $95.00 (cloth).

Marc Ricciardi

In the pantheon of unlikely friendships, Johnson and Milton’s appears the mostunlikely. And yet, a close reading of both writers clearly establishes that each iscommitted to his own peculiar aesthetic and ethical vision of the world: Johnson, anencyclopedic advocate of the natural world and Milton of the supernal. Johnson isthe poet of human limitation, of boundaries, of the utterable, verging dangerouslynear the precipice of the morally and ethically knowable, but stopping short at theextreme edge, whereas Milton, the poet of infinity, of limitless vistas, of the univer-sally unutterable, leaps from off the most precarious heights, spreads his wings, andsoars. Yet, despite this clash of sensibilities, Johnson’s Life of Milton is still the greatestspiritual biography of the poet, where one mind attempts to authentically engagewith another despite differences and disparities of temperament, belief systems, andcritical mores concerning the function of poetry and its mimetic affinities to life. Tothis day, however, Johnson’s approach to Milton continues to be critically malignedas a surly, bitter, and spiteful condemnation of Milton both as man and poet. Fortu-nately, Christine Rees’s new book on Johnson not only assists in dispelling these ste-reotypes, but takes it three steps further, maintaining that Johnson was profoundlyinfluenced by Milton’s poetical psyche, not simply in a reactive way, defining himselfthrough antithesis, but more importantly, in an assimilative way, creatively respond-ing to the rich nuances inherent in the Miltonic sublime.

Rees undoubtedly recognizes the agon, the “struggle for authority” that existsbetween these “two giants of the early modern canon” (4), but she subtly discrimi-nates between an authentic struggle for poetic self-transcendence as opposed to thefalse resistance of an exaggerated autonomy. For Johnson and Milton, their profoundsense of self-assertion and commitment to higher ideals is always collaborative innature, always within a “shared tradition of Christian humanism” (4). The differencelies in their translation of such a vision, how best to proceed from the vantage pointof authentic knowledge to the certitude of an indelible truth. Johnson understoodthe necessity of the immense discipline that he imposed upon himself in that searchfor truth, philosophically, not theologically or mythologically, attempting to incor-porate truth into the secular scheme of life. Milton, no less militant in his zeal, adds amystical and mythical dimension to that search, absent in Johnson, allegorizing thatquest for truth into a personal archetype (14-15). And yet, Rees argues that such aventure on Milton’s part does not challenge Johnson’s own authority, but reinforcesit, furthers his commitment to the quotidian in a way that makes knowledge acces-sible, usable, and translatable to the exigencies of human experience in a way that iscomprehensible and necessary for Johnson. Morality and mortality haunt both men.Neither could, or would, free himself from eschatological thinking: Johnson pro-ceeding from particular to universal truths as evinced in Rasselas and the Vanity ofHumanWishes and Milton from the atemporal to the temporal as seen in his sonnetsand tragic epic cycles. And yet, Rees never allows the reader to forget that both areespousing the same belief, an ideal of intellectual heroism (24), that seeks to achievean inner paradise, a place of peaceful repose the endings of their poetic masterpiecesseek to establish. This is the apex of wisdom literature and the culmination of the

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spiritual truths that both poems attempt to inculcate within the discerning reader.Whether it be the authoritative voice of Imlac or Raphael, Mr. Rambler or Godthe Son, angelic homilies (73) and the reintegration of the self (76) are always inthe forefront of Johnson and Milton’s mindset. Resistance to finality, acceptanceof mystery, overcoming tribulation, and post-idyllic exile are endemic to theircanons.

Because the stakes are so high for Johnson, he has no patience for Milton’s self-representation or self-fashioning as one elect, prophetic, and exalted from the rest.Johnson prides himself on his common humanity as seen in his elegy On the Death ofDr. Robert Levet, a collaborative union of failure and fortitude in the midst of commoncalamity. Milton is no less empathetic, but appears so, since he courts isolation andpublic acrimony with a purposeful gusto, much like Abdiel turning his back exultinglyon his Satanic cohorts in Paradise Lost. Milton sees adversity as an opportunity for self-aggrandizement, whereas for Johnson suffering is too painful to stand outside of one’sown humanity only to transfigure it into an artistic construct. Johnson, Rees remindsus, values heroism, but has no patience for Milton’s heroic posturing and consistentlyseeks to deflate Milton’s mythic discourse concerning himself (202-03). However,Rees perceptively points out that this is just another example of Johnson and Miltonbeing on opposite ends of the same continuum. Both were Renaissance men, both“entertained rebellious sentiments,” and “Johnson’s temperament, no less than Mil-ton’s, led him into support for minorities and lost causes” (195). Both men shared“‘the experience of defeat’” (195): blindness, physical infirmity, defeated expectation,late fame, and troubled marriage. The difference is that their common experiences ledto uncommon responses.

Johnson’s commonality of failure and Milton’s exclusivity of purpose forcedthem to respond to life based upon their variegated temperaments—“Johnson’stemperament leads him to a political philosophy that emphasizes the need for exter-nal order, a system that stabilises and controls the self-determination of the indi-vidual, whereas Milton challenges external order in the interests of promoting thatself-determination, making individual responsibility the cornerstone of freedom”(207). In that respect, Milton does serve as the prototype for the Romantic rebel,struggling to be released from those social constructs that inhibit his poetical, politi-cal, and social idealism. Interestingly enough, Rees points out that even before theRomantics appropriated Milton as one of their own, Johnson was acutely aware ofMilton’s conflicted ethos, the duality between Milton “the pre-Restoration polemi-cist” and Milton “the post-Restoration epic poet” (209). When addressing Milton’spolitics, Johnson “fixes Milton’s character as that of the eternal rebel” (208), as onewho, like his Satan, suffers from a “‘sense of injured merit’ (Paradise Lost I. Line98)—the satanic motive for malignity” (198), but when addressing Milton’s poetry,Johnson accepts all of Milton’s claims about himself, especially about his high voca-tion, simply because Milton’s “expectation [was] ultimately fulfilled” (198). It is atestimonial to the honesty and integrity of Johnson that not once does he ever ques-tion Milton’s “submission to the authority of God” (208) regardless of his dismiss-iveness toward human authority.

The value of Rees’s book lies not only in that it is the only one of its kind, buther holistic approach to her protagonists’ inner and outer lives is totally comprehen-sive. She not only looks at the individual talents of both men, but then establishes anintertextual dialogue between them, each transfiguring and influencing the other,irrespective of the exigencies of time and being. Like Dryden, Rees believes that all

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great lives are both other and the same. She appropriates the texts, assesses theachievements, and constructs the characters of each literary icon with such a fineattention to detail, that Rees herself interiorizes the same ethical and literary prin-ciples that Johnson and Milton employed in their lifetime. She “numbers the streaksof the tulip,” to quote Johnson’s Imlac, without ever forgetting the magnitude of thetask at hand. A perfect example is her recognition of Johnson’s sympathetic engage-ment with three qualities commonly overlooked in Milton—his humility, solitude,and sadness. Johnson is sensitive to, and appreciative of, these virtues, embodyingthem himself, and in a poignant moment in his Life of Milton, draws attention to thepoet who, in the midst of writing Paradise Lost after lately defending the honor of hiscountry, could publish a little book on grammar, descending “‘from his elevationto rescue children from the perplexity of grammatical confusion’” (221). Johnsonplaced a tremendous burden of responsibility upon the author as the moral custo-dian of the literary imagination, especially in regard to the young and innocent, andto see him cast Milton in a similar role is a testimonial to Johnson’s absolute trust inMilton’s purity of intentions and singularity of purpose, virtues that Johnson doesnot even attribute to Shakespeare.

What results is that fundamentally, Johnson acknowledges and accepts theintrinsic purity of Milton’s spiritual greatness—the poet as Writer-hero—andregardless of the incongruities Johnson finds in Milton’s self-portraits, he and Miltonare essentially in agreement on two truths: the “genuine belief in the essential unityof text and writer” (242), regardless of the inevitable disparities to be found, and theconviction that true “genius is God-given” (246). For Johnson, there can be nodoubt that “Milton hath quit himself like Milton” and inevitably “ ‘lived up to hisreputation’” (243). The only remaining question that Rees conjectures Johnsonmay have continued to struggle with is never quite understanding “God’s favourit-ism in electing Milton to write Paradise Lost” (247). Why him and not me is acommon lament that haunts any artistic endeavor that is good but perhaps not goodenough. Johnson himself was troubled by his failure to produce a magnum opus ofsuch caliber, for regardless of how his dictionary or lives were applauded in hislifetime, he always felt that something else remained to be done. Perhaps whenconfronted with the magnitude of Milton’s aspirations and the measure by whichhe fulfilled them, Johnson, as Greg Clingham reminds us, was haunted by howlittle Milton left to be forgiven, a forgiveness Johnson readily and easily extendedto most of the poets in his Lives. What can possibly be given when nothing islacking? Such is the burden and the blessing of being Milton and for those whoreadily engage him. On a final note, Rees cites Johnson’s account of Milton’s deathas being an “entirely natural and peaceful ending” (238), demonstrating the inevi-table coalescing of the man’s interior and exterior life. However, Boswell also spe-cifically mentions in his Life that Johnson died “with so little apparent pain that hisattendants hardly perceived when his dissolution took place.” Like the hero of hispoem On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet, death also “broke at once the vital chain /And freed [Johnson’s] soul the nearest way.” Art and life inevitably merged forJohnson in the end as well, and in the final elegiac words of Rees: “With thissuperb valediction and validation, Johnson completes the cutting of his Colossus”(247).

St. Joseph’s CollegePatchogue, New York



Stella P. Revard, ed. John Milton:Complete Shorter Poems. Malden, MA andOxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. xxii + 577pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-4051-2926-8.$110.00 (cloth); 13: 978-1-4051-2927-5. $42.95 (paper).

Sarah Knight

In his letter to the reader at the start of Milton’s 1645 Poems, the printer Hum-phrey Moseley declared that he was “bringing into the Light as true a Birth, as theMuses have brought forth since our famous Spencer wrote.” All publishers ofcourse promote the novelty and excellence of their authors, but Moseley’s claimthat his octavo volume would bring into the light a true birth is attested by thenumber of times Milton’s 1645 poems (1645) have been edited: much morefrequently than those by “our famous” Spenser, and most lately by Stella Revardfor Wiley-Blackwell as part of her Complete Shorter Poems. Revard’s edition, whichalso includes the 1673 poems (1673) not published in 1645, the 1694 sonnets,unpublished Latin poems, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, is part of a three-volume set of “John Milton in original language and in readily accessible paper-backs” (xiii). Affordable and portable, this edition will be particularly useful forstudents, as evidenced by the editor’s inclusion of an introductory chronologyand extensive notes to help with unfamiliar vocabulary—such as the glossing ofthe archaic “Emprise” as “enterprise” (107) in Milton’s masque—as well as withallusions. For while even the most well-steeped Milton scholar may not know Elijahas “the Tishbite prophet” (“vates terræ Thesbitidis” [164-65]), as he is described inElegia Quarta, elsewhere in the edition glosses on names such as “Cerberus” as “dogwho guards the underworld” in L’Allegro (48) are more clearly aimed to help newerreaders of Milton’s poetry.

This edition is likely to be compared with John Carey’s Complete ShorterPoems (Longman, 1968; 2nd ed. 1997) and Roy Flannagan’s Riverside Milton (1998),both student-friendly editions frequently found on undergraduate and postgraduatereading lists. Revard’s Textual Introduction acknowledges a relatively light and dip-lomatic editorial touch; for the most part, Revard has “used the 1645 edition bothfor the language and for the accidentals,” apart from on a “few occasions, where war-ranted by obvious mistakes or probable printers’ oversights” (xxi) she has preferredreadings from 1673, the Trinity Manuscript, and earlier printings of Lycidas, amongother works. Replication of the ordering of 1645 (15-283) enables readers to expe-rience at first-hand the sequence in which the poems were originally arranged;although obviously this edition is not a facsimile, it still gives us as strong senseof the publication’s material characteristics: “we present the book,” Revard states,“as Milton envisioned it, as an entity” (xxiii). The main alternative to this approachis a chronological ordering of the poems, which gives the reader a stronger sense ofhow Milton’s writing evolved across time. While Revard’s decision to prioritizethe original structure of publication rather than presenting the poems in order oflikely composition cannot offer as individualized a sense of authorial evolution asCarey’s chronologically organized edition, nonetheless readers of this new editioncan still form a clear impression of Milton’s development between the composi-tional bookends of his student poems of the 1620s and the two longest of the“shorter” poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published toward the end ofhis life.

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In her endeavor to reproduce the published arrangement of 1645 and notmodernize the texts, Revard’s approach is more in accordance with how Flan-nagan presents the poems in the Riverside Milton. Both Revard’s and Flannagan’seditions differ from Carey’s Complete Shorter Poems, in which, as we have seen,chronological ordering is preferred, spelling modernized, and early-modernpunctuation reproduced faithfully. A comparison of the first two lines of Lycidasin Revard (as also edited in Flannagan) and those in Carey illustrates howthese different approaches might affect the reader’s encounter with thispoem:

Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once moreYe Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear [Flannagan; Revard]

Yet once more, O ye laurels and once moreYe myrtles brown, with ivy never sere [Carey]

The notes on these lines differ significantly, too: Revard’s gloss of “never-sear”is “never withered,” presented in smaller italics in a marginal gloss directly to theright of the line, while Carey glosses his “never sere” as “evergreen,” includedin a twelve-line footnote covering the whole of the first two lines of the poem.Both Carey and Revard note the echo of Hebrews 12.26-27 and the “voice” that“speaketh from heaven”: “Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but alsoheaven.” Flannagan does not mention Hebrews. Each nuance of annotationorientates the reader in a particular direction—as arguably editors cannot help butdo—and while Milton scholars are likely to own and consult all three and moreeditions, undergraduate students choosing one edition one might want to browseCarey, Flannagan, and Revard and work out which presentation and annotation bestsuits their needs.

Teaching from this edition would help me to show students taking Miltonon an English course something which is often not acknowledged, namely theextent to which Milton’s reputation was based on his bilingual (English andLatin)—if not quadrilingual (with the addition of poems in Greek and Italian)—compositional habits. This edition’s material reconstruction of the original structureof the 1645 Poems presents incontestable proof to even the most stubbornlyanglophone reader of Milton that their author intended the Poemata to bejuxtaposed with the Poems, and for his subsequent reputation to be based on hisprowess in both languages. Revard’s edition will be particularly useful to the readerwithout Latin; the translations by Lawrence Revard are clear and fluent, notleast because of the pains taken to conserve the rhetorical emphasis of Milton’s Latinas well as the literal meaning. We see this exemplified in this edition’s presentationof the 1626 student poem Elegia Prima when the speaker laments the philistinism ofthe university:“Quàm male Phœbicolis convenit ille locus!” (144) The translation—“That place, how poorly it suits followers of Phoebus!”—alters Milton’s syntax,transposing the English rendition (“That place”) of “ille locus” to the start ratherthan the end of the line, but keeping the force that such a pronounced syntacticalpositioning allows. The note to this poem states that Milton wrote it “havingapparently been rusticated from Cambridge”; the “apparently” appropriately erodesthe certainty of this statement, although it is also possible that the “exilium” to



which Milton refers could just mean the length of the university vacation. But this isa minor quibble.

Considering first the publication context of 1645, Revard’s short introduction(1-9) also mentions the circumstances surrounding the composition of specificpoems and outlines the various forms in which Milton chose to work. The 1645introduction is inclusive rather than exhaustive; for more sustained and in-depthcriticism for any of the aspects briefly mentioned here, the reader will need to lookbeyond the edition, but Revard offers several stimulating points of entry into thepoems. Unlike Carey in the Longman edition, Revard’s aim is not to encompassrecent secondary criticism on the poetry as well as present reliable texts of thepoems; the footnotes gloss references and place the poems in context rather thanoffer interpretations. That said, an additional six short introductions help the readerfurther: the 1645 Poemata receives a separate Introduction (121-25) as do 1673(284-89), the “uncollected poems” including the 1694 sonnets and two Latin poems(“Carmina Elegiaca” and “Ignauus Satrapam” [354-57]), a short introduction to thetwo 1671 longer poems (373-74), then separate introductions for Paradise Regained(375-81) and Samson Agonistes (451-56). These introductions do not break up theoriginal publication order but they do punctuate the collection and separate one setof poems from another. On balance, these shorter introductions might be morestudent-friendly than one all-encompassing general introduction. The introductionsreflect several of their editor’s scholarly interests: there is detailed discussion ofpoetic form, e.g., the introduction chiefly of “sonnets and psalm translations” into1673 (285) and Milton’s careful balancing of elegies and odes in the Poemata as in1645 (121). Given the editor’s neo-Latin work, the Poemata introduction makesclear why even monoglot readers should consider these poems very carefully:Revard notes the diversity of the Poemata, their blending of the topical, formal, per-sonal and experimental, and their chronological ordering “from early Latin exercisesto mature poems” (121).

The claim that this edition will be “readily accessible” is further substantiatedby the inclusion of a ten-page Select Bibliography and well-chosen facsimiles oftitle-pages and frontispieces giving the reader a valuable impression of how theseventeenth-century publications would have looked. The Appendices will appealespecially to teachers and students of Milton’s masque: the entertainment that—despite Milton scholars’ best efforts—students will probably know as Comus—ishere reproduced in two versions: the masque as printed in 1645 (88-120), alongwith an Appendix containing a transcription of the Bridgewater Manuscript (515-38). This is followed by a facsimile of Henry Lawes’s manuscript of songs andanother facsimile of the Trinity Manuscript containing Milton’s autograph correc-tions of a page from the masque. Such Appendices will prove useful when teachingthis particular text, and will enable the teacher to emphasize the performance con-siderations of seventeenth-century masques (music and acting) as well as the stagesof Milton’s text’s progression, from notebook to manuscript to performance toprint.

This new edition gives us an accurate picture of how Milton’s publicationof his shorter poems evolved across a lifetime. Its main strength, in my opinion,is that Revard will introduce readers who might otherwise not have consideredMilton as a literary polyglot to the 1645 Poemata and other Latin and Italianpoems in their proper contexts, which cannot but enrich such readers’ under-standing of Milton’s work. As well as emphasizing classical and neo-Latin influ-

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ences, Revard’s emphasis on Milton’s debt to Italian poetry and his formativevisit to the country and its academies in the 1630s will also enhance students’awareness of the writer’s biography and literary formation. In the Testimonia at thestart of the Poemata, the young poet Antonio Francini calls Milton a “fabro quasidivino” (“craftsman almost divine”) and praises his “varie favelle” (“various lan-guages” [136-37]): this new edition helps us to understand the formal workings ofthe craftsmanship and to place the various languages in their proper place withinMilton’s career.

University of Leicester

Jason P. Rosenblatt, ed. Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts,Biblical Sources, Criticism. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010. xx +681pp. ISBN 978-0-393-97987-9. $16.95 (paper).

Stephen B. Dobranski

W. W. Norton and Company began publishing its Critical Edition series in1961 with inaugural volumes devoted to Huckleberry Finn and Gulliver’sTravels, soonfollowed by other canonical texts aimed at high-school and college students. Natu-rally, the first text of Milton’s to be included in the series was Paradise Lost, editedby Scott Elledge (1975), who went on to produce a thoroughly revised secondedition—at one time the best-selling volume in the series—which the press laterreplaced with a revised and re-edited text by Gordon Teskey (2005). As Norton’sseries continues to expand—I counted 215 titles in the online catalogue—the Criti-cal Editions still attempt to appeal to instructors and student readers. Each volumeaccordingly contains the same three core components that distinguished the originalvolumes published 50 years ago:“an authoritative text, contextual and source mate-rials, and a wide range of interpretations—from contemporary perspectives to themost current critical theory.”

I am taking this last quotation from the back cover of the newest Norton Criti-cal Edition of Milton’s works, Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Jason P.Rosenblatt, a welcome contribution to the series and a long-needed complement toNorton’s editions of Paradise Lost. An instructor might now consider ordering thesetwo books for a seminar on Milton with the expectation that no additional contex-tual or critical works would need to be put on reserve or otherwise distributed.Rosenblatt’s volume contains 36 of Milton’s English poems, including ParadiseRegained and Samson Agonistes, along with new, verse translations by William Shul-lenberger of three of Milton’s Latin poems, Elegia Quinta, Ad Patrem, and EpitaphiumDamonis. The book also includes six of Milton’s prose works, all of which areprinted in their entirety with the exception of An Apology for Smectymnuus, forwhich Rosenblatt has excerpted part of Milton’s autobiographical digression. Fol-lowing a brief section containing four of Milton’s biblical sources, the volume con-cludes with a chronology and a section labeled Criticism, which comprises onepoem and 13 critical commentaries by twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers.

On the whole, the annotations in Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose reflectRosenblatt’s sensitivity and erudition as a reader of early modern literature. Copious



but not intrusive footnotes provide valuable insights and explanations, while succinctmarginal glosses address potentially unfamiliar words or references in Milton’spoetry. Rosenblatt has also written separate, mostly brief introductions for each ofthe complete prose treatises in the volume as well as for seven of Milton’s poems:“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, A Masque Presentedat Ludlow Castle, Lycidas, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. For all other worksin the volume, Rosenblatt has incorporated into his footnotes a few helpful intro-ductory remarks, primarily about each poem’s biographical context.

As with any “selected” edition, Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose might initiallyseem more notable for what is missing than for what Rosenblatt has chosen toinclude. Most striking is the absence of De Doctrina Christiana (it is generouslyexcerpted in Elledge’s editions of Paradise Lost but also missing from Teskey’s recentvolume). And, with the exception of the one passage from An Apology, Rosenblatthas completely passed over Milton’s anti-prelatical and Latin prose. Thus, readersmust look elsewhere for the revealing autobiographical digressions in The Reason ofChurch-Government and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (again, Elledge initiallyfound space to reproduce all three of Milton’s autobiographical passages, while Tes-key’s volume prints only a selection from Reason). Still, Rosenblatt should be com-mended for including the volume’s other prose selections in their entirety so thatreaders can appreciate the structure of individual arguments and trace the develop-ment of Milton’s ideas.

But beyond an assessment of the works selected for the edition, a possibleobjection to Rosenblatt’s text concerns the parts of the critical commentary thatseem to belie the book’s intended audience—“the student and the sought-afteramateur,” as Rosenblatt describes his ideal readers (xi). In some places, the volume’scommentary seems targeted to students so that, for example, Rosenblatt helpfullyexplains the structure and major themes of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, and usefullypoints readers to collections of introductory essays on Lycidas that provide a detaileddiscussion of Milton’s pastoral elegy. But, in other places, the edition seems to bepitched to a specialized audience and, instead of reflecting the general needs ofuninformed readers, focuses on Rosenblatt’s specific interests. The preface to OfEducation, for example, seems more scholarly than introductory, and, while Rosenb-latt’s own research on John Selden is insightful and important, Selden might notmerit such a lengthy discussion in the introduction to The Doctrine and Discipline ofDivorce. Here, I think, uninitiated readers would do better to learn about the Englishchurch’s position on divorce or about the other arguments for and against the indis-solubility of marriage that preceded Milton’s during the first half of the seventeenthcentury.

Based on my experiences as an instructor, I also doubt that readers unfamiliarwith Milton’s writings will readily understand passing references to, say, the “virtu-ally Socinian depiction” of the Son in Paradise Regained (94), the “Sinai theophany”in Paradise Lost (321), the “saintly ataraxia” avoided in The Tenure of Kings and Magis-trates (384), Milton’s ongoing support of “the Good Old Cause” (419), or even thedescription of John Selden as “the Erastian MP” (334). All such terms would ideallybe explained.

The volume begins with a thought-provoking thesis but it, too, might speakmost forcefully to readers already familiar with Milton’s writings. Rosenblatt,working from his excellent analysis in Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton, NJ:Princeton UP, 1994), specifically proposes what he calls a “principle of monist conti-

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nuity” in “Milton’s greatest works of poetry and prose” (xiii). This idea grows out ofMilton’s heretical material philosophy and his belief that the body and spirit aremade from the same matter, a theory that Milton articulates most fully in De Doct-rina Christiana and Paradise Lost. Rosenblatt argues that a similar monist quality findsintellectual and aesthetic expression in the way that Milton accepts various types ofhierarchies in his works but repeatedly demonstrates that the lower elements areincluded within—not rejected by—the higher. Rosenblatt thus correlates the unionof pagan, Hebraic, and Christian belief systems with a three-part structure that hefinds in Milton’s poetry, and he pursues a related “monistic aesthetic” in Of Education(319) and a “monist hermeneutic” in Areopagitica (337) and The Tenure of Kings andMagistrates (382). Once again, I am intrigued by Rosenblatt’s insight into Milton’sthinking, and this theory of inclusiveness certainly has a broad liberal appeal. But itmight not deserve so much emphasis in a volume targeted to beginning readers.Using this thesis as a principle of selection for the works by Milton included in theedition seems, moreover, tautological: Milton’s works of poetry and prose are inclu-sive so long as we exclude the ones that are not?

Instead, I think, inquisitive, uninitiated readers would benefit from moredetailed and precise accounts of the context and significance of Milton’s individualworks. To assert, for example, that “divorce with the right to remarry” was “a posi-tion virtually none of his contemporaries was willing to maintain” is misleading(231). By the end of the sixteenth century all Protestant courts—Swiss, German,Scottish, Scandinavian, and French Protestant—had legalized divorce with the rightto remarry for the innocent spouse, and some Protestant marriage courts allowedboth parties to marry again. Or, I would argue that Milton had not, in fact,“ardentlysupported the Presbyterians” in the 1640s (75). More accurately, Milton ardentlyopposed episcopacy. He had supported Presbyterianism because it represented themost expedient way of challenging an episcopal system of church government, notbecause he had an intensely devoted commitment to Presbyterians.

In the preface, Rosenblatt helpfully describes the volume’s basic editorial prin-ciple, but some explanation is also needed for the collection’s design and layout. Inkeeping with the book’s target audience, Rosenblatt has chosen to modernize spell-ing, italics, punctuation, and capitalization in order, he proposes, to render Milton’stexts “more readable” (xi). The exceptions are the few passages that retain the oldspelling so as to preserve Milton’s rhyme or the nuances of his evocative diction. Butreaders should also be told how the individual texts have been arranged. Why,readers might reasonably wonder, does the Nativity Ode precede such earlier worksas a translation of Psalm 114, “On the Death of a Fair Infant,” and “At a VacationExercise”?

Potentially more confusing is the layout of some of the poetry: the spaceneeded for the editor’s marginal glosses repeatedly interferes with the presentationof the poems’ line-breaks, a problem that especially mars Milton’s sonnets. Foldingunder individual lines of verse creates the appearance of radical prosodic irregularityinstead of a strict metrical structure. In Sonnet 19, to take one example, the power ofMilton’s concluding caesurae and enjambment—“they serve him best. His state / Iskingly: thousands at his bidding speed”—is ruined by the interruption of a page-turn and the stranding of the single foot “His state” at the bottom of the page as if itwere a separate line of verse.

The title-page transcriptions of Milton’s prose works further muddle thelayout. While Rosenblatt should be commended for implicitly acknowledging in



these instances that a work’s material design contributes to its poetic meaning, partsof the title pages are inexplicably presented in old spelling and with original capitali-zation and italics. And that these transcriptions run directly into the treatises in someplaces—also without explanation—could confuse even experienced readers. Thus,at the start of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, “LONDON | Imprinted in theyeare 1644.” appears without any extra line-spacing immediately above the tract’sfirst line, “To the Parliament of ENGLAND, with the Assembly” (234). Nor are allthe title-page transcriptions presented consistently and accurately. With Areopagitica,for example, the subtitle is misquoted (missing is “of Mr. John Milton” after“Speech”), the text has been modernized, and the imprint has been silently omitted(337). Readers might wonder, too, why none of the title pages from Milton’s poetryis included, even though both the 1645 Poems and the separate title page of SamsonAgonistes bear provocative quotations—from, respectively, Virgil and Aristotle—thatseem equally relevant as, say, the passage from Euripides quoted on the title page ofAreopagitica.

The inattention to Milton’s material texts extends into the presentation ofindividual poems within the volume. Rosenblatt does not mention, for example, therevision that Milton made to the Nativity Ode between 1645 and 1673 (lines 143-44), the apparent addendum to A Masque in the printed version (lines 779-806), therevisions to “On Shakespeare” between 1632 and 1645, or the omission of ten linesfrom Samson Agonistes in the first edition (lines 1527-35, 1537). Highlighting suchpassages in the footnotes would provide readers with valuable glimpses into Milton’sprocess of authorship. In particular, the missing ten lines in Samson as the Chorusand Manoa react to Samson’s offstage destruction of the theater can help studentssee how even apparently subtle aspects of Milton’s writings greatly affect themeaning and how Milton may have worked with members of the printing house toengage and challenge his works’ few, fit readers.

Other possible glitches in the volume should have fallen under the purview ofan eagle-eyed copy-editor. The press should not have allowed, for example, wholesentences from the preface to be repeated in the introductions for Samson, The Doc-trine and Discipline of Divorce, and Of Education. And a copy-editor should have alsonoticed that, as evidence of Milton’s polemical career, we read at the start that hisprose “fills nineteen of the twenty-one volumes of the Columbia edition of thecomplete works” (xii), but we later read that Milton’s “prose takes up sixteen ofthe eighteen volumes in the still-definitive Columbia edition” (231). At least all ofthe passages from Milton’s poems and prose works that are quoted in the book’snotes and introductory sections should consistently include parenthetical citations sothat readers unfamiliar with Milton’s works can put the quotations in context.Theeditions that we use to teach should also serve as models for the type of well-documented critical writing that we expect from our students. To write only that “itis said,” without attribution, that Edward King remained on deck praying after hisship struck a rock does not allow readers to assess the source’s truthfulness (68). Or,when Rosenblatt quotes Milton, “One’s country is wherever it is well with one”(383), readers are not told where Milton made this remark (namely, in a 1666 letterto Peter Heimbach, not included in the edition).

The critical works reprinted in Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose—choosingthem was evidently “the hardest part of editing this volume” (xiii)—also raise somequestions. Naturally, literary scholars can quibble about the inclusion of somepieces and omission of others. The 1987 essay by Stanley Fish on Areopagitica that

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Rosenblatt has selected, for example, proved influential in the 1990s, but it has beenchallenged and significantly qualified by later scholarship, while Mary Nyquist’sessay has so much to say about Paradise Lost that it might have been judiciouslyedited to make room for other voices that speak more fully to the texts in thevolume. More important, though, that 8 of the 14 critical pieces included here werefirst published in the 1980s—and only two date from the past decade—suggests thatthe book’s selection of criticism may be too narrow. As a group, these works seem tofall short of the publisher’s claim that the Norton Critical Editions present “themost current” scholarship.

I would also question the inclusion of Anthony Hecht’s “Lizards and Snakes” inthis section. Although Hecht’s delightful poem could no doubt foment a thoughtfulclass discussion or undergird a provocative essay assignment, it hardly seems tobelong in a group of texts entitled “Criticism.” More properly, it would fit alongsideother poetic commentaries on Milton by, say, John Dryden or William Wordsworthas well as responses and allusions to Milton in literary works by Mary Ann Evans,Andrew Marvell, and AlfredTennyson.

This type of more varied and richer selection of commentary—perhapsentitled “Early responses” or “Poetic replies”—might also replace the book’s fourbiblical source texts: Judges 13-16, Psalms 6 and 114, Matthew 20 and 25, and Luke4. (Curiously, Rosenblatt does not include here Hebrews 11.32, despite his repeatedclaims for its significance as “the real source” of Samson Agonistes [xiii, 155].) In con-trast to 50 years ago, when the Norton Critical Editions began, today’s readers canquickly locate biblical citations and allusions in online editions and even comparealternative translations. Another more useful approach to this section might havebeen to provide excerpts from harder-to-find source materials, such as fromseventeenth-century licensing laws or other early modern tracts about divorce orkingship.

Ultimately, reading through Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, despite the vol-ume’s many merits, raises doubts about the future of the Norton Critical Editions asan ongoing series. With the growing popularity of wireless reading devices, today’sstudents and instructors can piece together their own contextual editions that suitreaders’ individual needs and interests. If even an edition as massive as The NortonAnthology of English Literature has resorted to publishing some of its primary materialonline, why shouldn’t readers of a book with a more modest scope rely on supple-mentary electronic texts to make their reading more accessible? I wonder whetherreaders 50 years from now will still want editions such as Milton’s Selected Poetry andProse that pre-package their texts with a few source materials and a partial samplingof modern criticism. Perhaps readers will continue to appreciate the ease of flippingthrough a single volume to study a literary work in context. Or, maybe in the future,if left to our own devices, we can do better on our own.

Georgia State University



Documents

Milton's Selected Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Biblical Sources, Criticism – Edited by Jason P. Rosenblatt