Aesthetics of contingency

Writing, politics, and culture in England, 1639–89

Matthew C. Augustine

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526100764
• eBook ISBN: 9781526127044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This new study raises fundamental questions about the nature of imaginative writing in the age of 'England's troubles'. Drawing energy from recent debates in Stuart history, this book looks past the traditional watersheds of Restoration and Revolution, plotting the responsiveness of seventeenth-century writers to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. Augustine draws freely from the insights and strategies of contextual analysis, close reading, and critical theory in a bid to defamiliarise major texts of the period, from the poetry of young Milton to the brilliant works of adaptation, translation, and bricolage that characterised Dryden's last decade. Muting the antagonisms and conflicts that have dominated previous accounts, Aesthetics of contingency thus proposes to write the literary history of this period anew.

1

‘He saw a greater Sun appear’: waiting for the apocalypse in Milton’s Poems 1645

Amidst any number of intensely felt preoccupations – the proper uses of poetry, the character of the true poet, the beauty of traditional forms and the felt imperative to innovate, or indeed to renovate – the Milton we meet in his debut collection is concerned perhaps above all with time. Themes of unreadiness and delay animate some of the 1645 volume’s most affecting verses. ‘How soon hath Time the suttle theef of youth, / Stoln on his wing my three and twentith yeer!’, begins Milton’s famous seventh sonnet: ‘My hasting dayes flie on with full career, / But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th’ (lines 1–4). Much of the power of Lycidas derives from the angst awoken in Milton by the death of Edward King ‘ere his prime’ (line 8), out of season and before his youthful promise could bear mature fruit – an especially anxious prospect for the twenty-nine-year-old poet, still living under his father’s roof. Moreover, this sense of belatedness not only provides a potent topos for Milton, it informs his strategies of self-presentation throughout the book.¹ Indeed, this poet can hardly wait to disperse his writing into the past, indicating in the very title of the Nativity Ode that it was ‘Compos’d 1629’, while Milton’s pair of psalmic paraphrases are said to have been ‘don by the Author at fifteen yeers old’ (p. 14). Where the aborted poem on the Passion trails off, Milton tells of finding the subject ‘to be above the yeers he had, when he wrote it’ (p. 19). Such intimations of precocity no doubt compensate for Milton’s disquiet over the untimely development of his great project of writing a national epic, something he had begun to contemplate as early as his Cambridge days. Other textual additions, like the headnote to Lycidas, endow the poet with the gift of prophecy, and illuminate a latent teleology of the self – that of the ‘reformist poetic bard’ – over against other possible selves glimpsed within the Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos’d at several Times.²

To the theme of chance arrival we shall return, but not before absorbing something of Milton’s anxiousness into the work of criticism it here occasions: for it has already been twenty years since Barbara Lewalski declared the moment ripe for ‘revising the revisionists’, in an essay confidently reaffirming that ‘from the outset [Milton] began to construct himself as a new kind of author, one who commands all the resources of learning and art but links them to radical politics, reformist poetics, and the inherently revolutionary power of prophecy’.³ In ‘revising revisionism’, Lewalski hoped to counter representations, especially of the young Milton, as ‘inconsistent and even something of a Cavalier, given that at times he used genres, imagery, publication modes, and stances associated with the court, the Laudian church, the Cavalier poets, and even with Roman Catholicism’. Since then, however, further challenges to the orthodox view of Milton have proliferated under the influence of developments in Stuart historiography and of the ‘new Milton criticism’. Perhaps most polemically, Peter Herman has taken issue with protocols that require the critic (as he sees it) to make Milton and above all Paradise Lost cohere, insisting by contrast that the failure of the English revolution prompted Milton to engage ‘in a wholesale questioning of just about everything he had argued for in his earlier prose works, and he does not come to a conclusion’ (his emphasis).⁴ Thus ‘it is out of the turmoil of not knowing what to affirm’, Herman contends, ‘that Milton creates some of his finest poetry’.⁵

As more than one commentator has noted, however, Herman’s ‘argument for the poet’s deliberate cultivation of a “poetics of incertitude” might also be construed at times to argue for a new, almost monolithic, Miltonic absolute’, merely inverting the regime of ‘unqualified certainty’ Herman so strenuously controverts.⁶ There is a similar single-mindedness to Catherine Gimelli Martin’s re-examination of Milton ‘in light of the new historiography of the English civil wars’: despite being framed along Revisionist lines, the story she tells in Milton among the Puritans (2010) is perfectly orthodox in its celebration of a Milton who is ‘radically reformist’ in his attitudes toward politics, education, and science.⁷ Here Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns seem more even-handed guides, no less deeply read in the historiography and willing to show us a Milton who is ‘flawed, self-contradictory, self-serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious, and cunning’, as well as one of ‘the most accomplished writers of the Caroline period, the most eloquent polemicist of the mid-century, and the author of the finest and most influential narrative poem in English’.⁸ But theirs is nonetheless ‘a hero’s life’, and on the horizon of their biography, much though Campbell and Corns eschew an Athena-like birth, looms Milton the radical poet-prophet, the stages of whose development ‘are the spine that runs through our study’.⁹

Neither biography nor yet another fine-tuned recalibration of Milton’s politics, this chapter is concerned rather with the process of history itself, insofar as such processes are represented in Milton’s poetry, and as Milton’s poetry figures in traditional historical narratives.¹⁰ My approach is guided by a pair of responses to Milton, one from the early nineteenth century, the other from the turn of the twenty-first, and in no little part by the unlikely chance of their convergence. Writing for the London Magazine in October 1820, Charles Lamb recounts with mock-horror the day he was shown the original copy of Lycidas in Milton’s poetical notebook, whereupon the monumentality, the historical given-ness of Milton’s achievement seemed to shatter into a thousand lived contingencies: ‘How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore!’, Lamb exclaims, ‘interlined! corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent!’¹¹ Without giving any sign that he is thinking of Lamb, Jonathan Goldberg’s superb essay of 1990, ‘Dating Milton’, rather more deliberately proposes a like decomposition of the poet. Instructively reading scenes of autobiography in Milton’s writing with a lively suspicion of the self-presence of the moment, Goldberg would trouble narratives which imagine ‘a Milton who was always the same, always himself’, offering in their place ‘one that refuses self-sameness either to “Milton” or to the supposed regularities of temporal progression’, resolutely open ‘to chance, contingency, and revision’.¹² ‘Yet by chance’, Goldberg later explains, ‘I do not mean to reduce history to mere randomness. It is Milton’s chance I am talking about, the chance delivery of the retrospectively recognizable Miltonic “I,” the chance, in short, that lets itself be called Milton’s chance; a story that only retrospectively, if then, could be called a story’.¹³

My focus in the following chapter is thus the problematic of becoming at the heart of Milton’s 1645 Poems. Students of Lycidas have long remarked the notorious device whereby ‘out of nowhere a third-person voice announces that the poem has, apparently all along, been sung by the “uncouth swain” (186)’, and so appears to transcend its uncertain beginning: ‘At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew: / To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new’ (lines 192–3).¹⁴ In republishing Lycidas, Milton also expressly links the poem to the fall of Laud and the regeneration of the English Church: ‘And by occasion fortels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height’ (p. 50). But if notes of apocalyptic and rebirth sound throughout the volume – epitomised in the rout of the pagan gods, the supersession of Apollo by some ‘greater Sun’ – the staging and re-staging of this theme ultimately folds millenarian rupture back into the fabric of secular time, in which, as Goldberg argues in a more recent essay, ‘the meaning of time remains provisional; we await a promised end that has never come’.¹⁵ The poems Milton collected and published in 1645 thus bear witness, as I read them, to the indeterminate matrix of messianic time – the time between the birth of Christ and the Second Coming – and to the fluctuating, successive, indifferent progress of grace, both in Milton and in Milton’s England. In uncovering this temporal and thematic paradigm, it is the aim of this chapter to unfetter Milton from history’s telos, forgetting the historical discourses in and through which we have come to recognise Milton as himself, those stories that, only retrospectively, can be called a story.

No apocalypse, not now

It is of course the great Nativity Ode that opens Milton’s Poems, in 1645 and in the second edition of 1673, and much has been made of its primacy as ‘prologue to the rising poet’s achievement’.¹⁶ The care Milton has taken in dating its composition, together with the occasional nature of the poem itself, have perhaps led inevitably to the Ode’s being read in terms of a ‘single and determinate moment of composition’ and ‘for the presumed presence of Milton writing at that very moment’, as Goldberg puts it.¹⁷ In his recent discussion of the Ode, for instance, Gordon Teskey sets the scene of the poem’s writing on the upper floor of Milton’s family house, on Bread Street, near St Paul’s Cathedral. It is 25 December 1629. ‘At that hour, and on that particular morning’, Teskey avers, ‘there would have been very few lights and very few sounds … the stars would have been visible and bright, especially from the hill’. Indeed, so powerful is the critic’s sense of Milton’s presence, he actually enters the scene of writing himself, assuming a perspective over the poet’s shoulder: ‘He was waiting for dawn’, Teskey writes, ‘which seemed, as it always does when we are watching for it, to hesitate before it arrives. The stars seemed reluctant to leave and the first light of dawn hadn’t touched the horizon to the east or the dark overhead. Perhaps he began at the beginning, and said to himself, “This is the month, and this the happy morn”’.¹⁸

Notwithstanding the evocative intensity of the prose, what seems most arresting here is the critical erasure of any trace of historical mediation: perhaps half recalling the proem to Book IX of Paradise Lost, where Milton tells of his muse’s ‘nightly visitation[s]‌’, inspiring ‘Easie my unpremeditated Verse’ (lines 21–4), Teskey pictures the composition of the Nativity Ode as a moment of pure immanence, and moreover his reading holds out the possibility of witnessing the ‘poetic birth’ as it happens, an untrammelled act of recognition.¹⁹ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on texts
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: remapping early modern literature
• 1 ‘He saw a greater Sun appear’: waiting for the apocalypse in Milton’s Poems 1645
• 2 ‘We goe to heaven against each others wills’: revising Religio Medici in the English Revolution
• 3 ‘But Iconoclastes drawn in little’: making and unmaking a Whig Marvell
• 4 ‘It had an odde promiscuous tone’: Lord Rochester and Restoration modernity
• 5 ‘Transprosing and Transversing’: religion, revolution, and the end of history in Dryden’s late works
• Coda
• Select bibliography
• Index