The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost

Reading against the Grain

Jonathon Shears

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351882439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost offers a new critical insight into the relationship between Milton and the Romantic poets. Beginning with a discussion of the role that seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers like Dryden, Johnson and Burke played in formulating the political and spiritual mythology that grew up around Milton, Shears devotes a chapter to each of the major Romantic poets, contextualizing their 'misreadings' of Milton within a range of historical, aesthetic, and theoretical contexts and discourses. By tackling the vexed issue of whether Paradise Lost by its nature makes available and encourages alternate readings or whether misreadings are imposed on the poem from without, Shears argues that the Romantic inclination towards fragmentation and a polysemous aesthetic leads to disrupted readings of Paradise Lost that obscure the theme, or warp the 'grain', of the poem. Shears concludes by examining the ways in which the legacy of Romantic misreading continues to shape critical responses to Milton's epic.

Chapter 1
The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: an introduction

Critical Reception

This book is about the relationship between Paradise Lost and Romantic literature. It is also about the legacy that Romantic readings of Paradise Lost have held, and still hold, on the critical consciousness. It seems curious that in the last decade no one has written at length on such a pervasive subject. It turns up almost everywhere in discussions of Romanticism.¹ Yet, since Lucy Newlyn’s book Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader was published in 1993, a veil of silence appears to have been drawn around the subject suggesting that Newlyn’s is, up until now, the final word on the matter. In 2001, Kay Gilliland Stevenson and Peter J. Kitson made the most recent review of Milton’s reception history in Thomas Corns’ A Companion to Milton. They rightly chose to split the essay into two at the horizon of the Romantic period – explicitly acknowledging that there occurs a sea change in the reception of Paradise Lost at the turn of the eighteenth century. Prior to this, Nicola Trott gave a comprehensive record of Romantic response to Milton in Duncan Wu’s A Companion to Romanticism,² but there has been no large-scale attempt made to tackle Newlyn’s provocative thesis that Romantic writers view Milton as a poet of Negative Capability, responding in a metaphorical way to amplify the indeterminacies they see in Milton’s text within their own verse.

There can be little argument that Romanticism in its broadest sense conceives both life and poetry to be vitally metaphorical and no longer in terms of stable metaphysics. Mark Sandy has recently argued that the second generation Romantics – namely Shelley and Keats – regard life and verse as does Nietzsche; the individual is merely a bridge to an unspecified future time which will be as pregnant with meaning as is Milton’s Urania brooding over the abyss: ‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going’.³ One bridge points to another which points to another and so on beyond our imaginative reach; the poet’s greatest achievement is to embrace his own transience, and so key Romantic poems such as The Fall of Hyperion and The Triumph of Life recount their own inability to provide closure: ‘This perpetual manifestation of creative self-invention in these fragmentary forms, question Enlightenment’s obsession with fixed, totalising, metaphysical explanations of the universe’.⁴ It might be argued that the line between Enlightenment metaphysics and Romantic metaphor can only be faintly drawn – Byron for one does not sit easily on the side of the fence that history has erected – but in all relevant senses I think this division holds true. Following the logic of Sandy’s position also suggests that form itself can enact a challenge to stable literary meaning, and I want to stress this point here because my argument later in this book will focus on the different responses characteristic to different forms and genres. One purpose of the Romantic Fragment Poem, for example, as delineated in recent times by Marjorie Levinson, Thomas McFarland and Anne Janowitz is to undermine fixed and stable forms of literature, particularly of the highest of poetic achievement: epic.⁵

What a contrast this is to many Romantic pronouncements on epic form, particularly when Paradise Lost is under discussion. We will find that Coleridge is protective: ‘I wish that the Paradise Lost were more carefully read and studied than I can see any ground for believing it is’; and that Keats steps back from reading in awe ‘the thousand Melancholies and magnificences of this Page – leaves no room for anything to be said thereon, but: “so it is”’.⁶ There seems, then, to be an unusual discrepancy at the heart of the Romantic legacy of Paradise Lost. On the one hand the Romantics were respecters of the awesome muscle of epic, on the other posterity perceives them to be formal assassins, designing the death of, if not God as Nietzsche proclaimed, then the stability of poetic form. The discrepancy is partly due to the transference between prose commentary on Milton and the verse products of these poets. Virtually all Romantic writers failed to produce the serious long poem they felt called towards – Wordsworth’s project for The Recluse fell apart, as did Coleridge’s Wanderings of Cain. Keats left both Hyperion poems incomplete, and Shelley’s Triumph of Life was curtailed by his death in Italy (admittedly an event out of his control). Ironically, Byron, who was perhaps least disposed to make epic pronouncements, wrote Don Juan, a type of mock epic, although even this poem was left unfinished. Once again literal fatality coincided with the death of the poem. It has long been understood that Romantic inheritors of Milton’s epic gauntlet were unable to sustain a mythology coherent enough to rival Milton’s Christian universe, or to produce a sustainable universe within the imagination as they also felt Milton had done. This is where the Keatsian awe comes in, but also an accompanying degree of resentment, most notably in Keats’s letter to Reynolds following his failure to complete the first Hyperion poem: ‘Life to him would be death to me’.⁷

It is one thing, however, allowing Romantic poets to wave a flag for metaphorical indeterminacy that might challenge stable metaphysical versions of the world. It is another to claim that, rather than impose such views on Paradise Lost, Milton himself authors a text which obeys the law of the Nietzschean Superman rather than the Christian Christ. Thomas Peacock has much fun in exposing the Coleridgean philosopher in Nightmare Abbey who asserts his personal perception as though it were absolute:

According to Berkeley, the esse of things is percipi. They exist as they are perceived. But, leaving for the present, as far as relates to the material world, the materialists, hyloists, and antihyloists, to settle this point among them, which is indeed

A subtle question, raised among

Those out o’ their wits, and those I’ the wrong

For only we transcendentalists are in the right: we may very safely assert that the esse of happiness is percipi. It exists as it is perceived.⁸

One of the features of Romantic misreading is that subjective perception objectifies its authority in this way – only a short step lies between this and Harold Bloom’s antithetical criticism in which poetry is ‘a concept of happening and not a concept of being’.⁹ Yet this is not quite the argument that Lucy Newlyn offers by subscribing wholeheartedly to the Romantic legacy of reading Paradise Lost. Newlyn reads Paradise Lost as metaphorical in its ambiguity, full of genuine contradictions, not metaphysical in its exactitude – it is a reading that I am going to counter in the present book. That is not to say it is my intention to spend this book attempting to refute Newlyn wholesale; rather, I take this most recent of studies as one significant departure point in engaging with a broad swathe of contemporary and Romantic criticism of Paradise Lost. It seems appropriate to take issue with Newlyn’s work first because this is where we are up to. She is not alone, however: Catherine Belsey’s deconstructionist take on Paradise Lost is not unlike Newlyn’s. Belsey writes of the futility of pursuing ‘phantom intention’ and the dangers of mistaking ‘spectral subjectivity’ for meaning.¹⁰ Her method derives from the theoretical models of Derrida and Bakhtin amongst others, including an insistence that ‘because the signifier cannot be anchored to a fixed, anterior presence “behind” it, meaning is always unstable, plural, dispersed and disseminated’.¹¹ Newlyn proposes the death of Milton’s God, Belsey the death of the author, but from different perspectives both privilege the demise of singular intention on Milton’s part. The irony of Belsey’s study is that her insistence on plurality outfacing more ‘despotic regimes’ (who take control of meaning ‘to fix it in their own interests’) fixes her own purposes more rigidly to the mid-1980s than Milton’s to the Restoration.¹²

Stanley Fish makes one of the points that I would like to pursue in the following chapters when he notes that ‘ambivalence, and open-endedness – the watchwords of a criticism that would make Milton into the Romantic liberal some of his readers want him to be – are not constitutive features of the poetry but products of a systematic misreading of it, a misreading performed in the poetry by Comus and Satan, a misreading of the poetry as old as Blake and Shelley and as new as Lucy Newlyn’.¹³ In my view, Fish accurately reads what we could describe as the current ‘Satanist heresy’ or ‘Satanic school’ – he is also correct to assert that there is a direct link between the critical methodology of writers such as Newlyn, Belsey, Stevie Davies, John Rogers and David Mikics and Romantic theorists of literary practice. Hazlitt’s embryonic version of Keats’ Negative Capability shows he is the direct antecedent of Newlyn’s methodology, the only difference being that Hazlitt applies his procedures to Shakespeare rather than to Milton: ‘The genius of Milton was essentially undramatic: he saw all objects from his own point of view, and with certain preferences. Shakespear [sic], on the contrary … left virtue and vice, folly and wisdom, right and wrong, to fight it out between themselves’. Newlyn is right, however, to emphasise that Romantic writers really did attribute such a sacrifice of authorial control to Milton as well. What this leads to is a conflict of ‘Miltons’ that Newlyn explains:

[There exists an] apparent contradiction between the ‘Milton’ who is constructed through conscious and explicit acts of appropriation and the Milton who emerges from carefully receptive and imitative habits of allusion. The first is a model of authority, intentionality, and religious certainty – a caricature of the deified imagination, which the Romantic readers frequently contrast with the ‘negative capability’ of Shakespeare. The second is a collocation of ambiguities and indeterminacies, gathered from the Romantics’ close reading (and rereading) of Paradise Lost.¹⁴

What this serves to also describe is, to all intents and purposes, the division between Newlyn herself and Fish. In recent years Fish has clarified his own position, originally drawn in Surpised by Sin (1967), to include Newlyn’s (and by implication the Romantics’) own methods as part of his/Milton’s educative process through which readers are brought from the waywardness of multiple misreadings to the stability of one stateable, whilst complex, authorial intention. Paradise Lost becomes on one level an allegory of its own recent reception history. Where Belsey and Newlyn read a multiplicity of contrary intentions, through the clash of religious and classical poetic registers, Fish locates a pedagogical purpose – readers are brought from multiplicity (metaphoricity) to a clearer understanding of univocal meaning (metaphysicality). This is the state that Lady Alice in Comus and Christ in Paradise Regained intrinsically present – the tempter (whether Comus or S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: an introduction
• 2 Milton in the Eighteenth Century
• 3 Blake
• 4 Wordsworth
• 5 Coleridge
• Interchapter: Exploring the Metaphor
• 6 Byron
• 7 Shelley
• 8 Keats
• 9 Milton in the Twentieth Century
• Bibliography
• Index