Notes from Six Feet Underground

‘Writing lives digested’

John Milton (d. 8-10 November 1674).

Bio:

There’s not much getting round it, Milton was a bit of a lad. In fact, were I to be able to preface this, I might say ‘Milton: Revolutionary, Intellectual, Lover’. He got this from his dad a bit I think (also called John), who was chucked out of the family for reading the Bible in English. Naughty boy. His dad then basically went to London and made some cash as a scrivener, John (the younger) would find this exceptionally handy as he grew up. Born in London (1608), he went to St. Paul’s, and other than a brief stint in the country learning Greek and Latin, he was always a London boy. He went up to Cambridge in 1625, here he made friends with, among others, Charles Diodati, but not with his tutors. He got in a couple of fights and his mum got scared. She died in 1637. In 1638 Diodati was buried too. Not ideal. By this time, the young Milton had already written On Shakespeare, and a masque, Comus, but he was still chilling out around Europe, taking in Florence with particular gumption, where he ‘contracted intimacy’ with ‘truly noble…men’. In 1639 he came back at the sight of the First Bishops’ War, ‘I thought it base’, he wrote, ‘that I should travel while my fellow citizens at home were fighting for liberty’. He started tutoring in 1640 and liked ‘to keep a gaudy day’, with some boys at Gray’s Inn. He writes a bit more, mainly about episcopacy (and how it’s wrong and junk) and then he marries a 16 year old.

So, so far,

Cambridge>Rusticated?>Grand Tour>Back for a fight>Tutoring>Getting Wasted>Marries a 16 year old

Lad.

Now really he’s only just started, and this is as the civil war breaks out. At this time though (1642), Johnny boy’s got more important things to worry about, these include divorce. Not an easy subject to justify in a 17th Century torn by Christian schism. These works are mainly published in 1643 and 44, when he also publishes a tract against censorship (Areopagitica). So not only is he defending divorce (on moral grounds), he’s also defending his right to defend divorce. Nice. In 1645 he prints Poems. They’re all right, but John has been busy also, and Mary Powell now 20-ish (Milton’s 37) issues a daughter, Anne. The next three years bring what some might call upheaval. His father dies, another daughter’s born, and Charles I is executed. Arguably we haven’t got to his three major works yet, and you imagine that he’s not the kind of guy who’d say ‘Let’s have a quiet one’.

Ding, ding, ding – we have a winner. Just as Charles I is executed, Milton decides to defend regicide. Not a conventionally wise move in a society who believed in the divine right of kings.

In 1651, his son is born. In 1652 he goes almost entirely blind, having suffered from glaucoma his entire life. One might reasonably expect that the now blind John Milton would enjoy five minute’s peace, instead, having gone blind, he learns Dutch, and let’s just say he didn’t have the Rosetta stone guide. This begins a perhaps unsurprisingly turbulent decade. As works he’s backed are burned in the street, he has another daughter, his wife dies after childbirth and his son dies. 1652 was a tricky year. Cromwell is installed as dictator and later Protector in 1653, but J-bag has other ideas. He remarries in 1656, and in 1657 has a daughter he names after his now second wife Katherine. They both die in 1658, after he’s begun work on Paradise Lost. He’s blind and he’s still getting girls, and writing a Biblical Epic. I’m not blind and I find walking difficult. As the British capture Dunkirk, the Protectorate (the governing power after the execution of Charles) are at an high. That is until Cromwell dies in September 1658.

Here’s our first ‘I told you so moment’. Regicide turned out not to be a good thing to support, and as Charles II accedes in 1660, Milton goes into hiding. He’s imprisoned, but powerful friends (Andrew Marvell et al) save him from the death penalty. Saved from execution he decides to remarry. At which point one must really just applaud his swagger. Unsurprisingly he’s on bad terms with his daughters, as he marries Ms. Minshull. This is though, arguably where his literary career takes off. He dictates his works to his wife (lad) and finishes Paradise Lost in 1665. In 1666 the fire of London has quite an impact on the manner in which the English consciousness defines itself (religious schism, regicide and massive fire equals conspiracy theorists’ wet dream), and Milton’s works – as he enters his dotage – take on a reflective air. It would be simplistic to say that either Paradise Regained, his four book poem concerning the Temptation of Christ, or Samson Agonistes, a tragedy on the eponymous character of the Old Testament, are an apologia for his earlier, more radical works; however, they (both 1671) do seem to be unneccessary confirmations of the theological and political positions he has held throughout his adult life. We know you love God and hate tyrants John, your earlier self might not have cared if they knew too. John Milton died in 1674.

Major Work:
Paradise Lost

PL was conceived of at least 15 years berofe its finalisation in 1665. At that time, Milton drafted it as a tragedy, but this was to evolve as the scope of his project broadened. Despite this, it has a number of tragical elements – Book IX, being almost a point in case. Equally, Satan has been regarded by many as a tragic hero, and certainly he has the allure of a Machiavellian protagonist in the opening three books. Many find Milton’s decision not to sustain this characterization as an apology to his Christian sympathies. Not the case. Rather, Satan must be seen as part of a wider tragic fabric that encompasses Man’s fall – the poem’s subject. This, though, too falls within the schema of the work as an epic. Milton was following Homeric models, and – particularly in its later 12 book incarnation (originally it was published as a poem in 10 books) – Virgil. The structure though is more complicated than this, and if Classical epic has a typical one month time scheme, Milton’s two transgressive days (his poems spans 33 days) reflects the same compositional pattern of Dante’s Divine Comedy and echoes Christ’s age at death. Further, Milton almost allegorizes the epic (see the comparisons between Satan and Odysseus), and this makes his a tertiary epic; this enables him to more easily incorporate extraliterary sources and metaliterary ideas. Chiefly, Milton draws on the latest astrological advances to create a spatial representation of the exultation of Christ. Not an easy thing to do. Essentially though, the construction of his epic was at all times designed to create in Christ the figure of the epic hero. This though is itself subsumed to the glory of God and submission to his will which is, in Milton’s mind, the ultimate expression of freedom, and impossible to convey in words.

This seems an highly intellectual project, and it was, but it was also widely accessible. It is certainly true that Milton’s language was distinctly Latinate, but this is to be expected with Latin as the 17th Century lingua franca. Rather, though conceding to this model, Milton sought to make his poem distinctly readable. Alastair Fowler notes that ‘Milton was modern in diction and accidence, avoiding obsolescent verb terminations’. Essentially this just meant that he didn’t sound like a twat, and this is important to take on board. Milton wants the reader to recognise themselves in the fallen couple, and to this ends makes Adam – who self consciously (wilfully) sins – the more culpable. He creates human characters, but godly heroes, and we are to recognise a lack of human worthiness at all times. This adds to the sense of consumption in the novel, just as Eve eats the apple, the reader greedily gnaws through Milton’s blank verse that he litters with internal rhyme and a notably suspensful syntax.

The exegetical problems of Miltons apparent Arminism, and the balance between puritannical and orthodox theology should be viewed in this light. Consumption, that mortal foil, is apparent in the conflicting interests of worldly churches. This has earlier formed the basis of Milton’s anti-episcopal works, and those agents who subsume themselves to earthly constructs (Satan (note not Lucifer), the Presbyterian Church, Eve and inevitably Milton himself), will always be found wanting in the eternal glory of God. This divinity, is the basis of PL, and a means too – one suspects – of Milton accepting his own blindness.

Milton now:

If he were living now, one might suspect Milton to be at a rally on some kind of motorised scooted, with his third wife chasing behind. I imagine he’d be wearing a pro-choice t-shirt with an Obama badge prominent.

Would like: The internet, America (probably)
Would dislike: Uninterrogated universal equality (he was a Republican but also an elitist), political correctness.