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The Development of Milton's Poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Irene Samuel
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Abstract

Although Milton wrote extensively on poetics, we cannot get his views by simply piecing together his scattered statements; they changed and developed to the end of his writing life. But central from early to late years were questions of the poet’s inspiration, relation to his audience, and possible usefulness. Perhaps the core of his poetics is best described by the Greek word paideia; for however distinctively Christian, Milton was too thoroughly the heir of humanism to disavow classical teaching and Renaissance commentary on poetics. Still, only his final poems in their implications can suggest his final theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 2 , March 1977 , pp. 231 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 All references to the poems are to John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957); all references to the prose are to volume and pages in The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931–38). I have in general normalized spellings and punctuation in the prose.

2 See Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary-Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, I (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), Chs. iv, v.

3 Milton echoes phrases from Horace's Ars Poetica, notably in Ad Pattern, but also throughout his work, even to “not … beyond the fifth act” in the prefatory note to Samson Agonist es. I have collected these echoes in an as yet unpublished essay.

4 See Plato and Milton (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1947).

5 See Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), pp. 7, 8, 26, et passim; Jacopo Maz-zoni, Delia difesa della comedia di Dante (Cesena, 1688), Libro II, Cap. 8, pp. 365–72; Irene Samuel, “The Influence of Plato on Sidney's Defense,” Modern Language Quarterly, 1 (1940); Weinberg, esp. pp. 324–28 and 339–40.

6 “The Images of Poet & Poetry,” Achievements of the Left Hand, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shaw-cross (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1974), p. 109.

7 As in his First Prolusion.

8 Even if we agree with John Steadman that the prefatory note to Samson is primarily an apologia and that Milton is using commonplaces primarily to defend his writing a tragedy at all, the way he puts together the commonplaces he chooses tells something. Here he implies by his juxtaposition a far from common view, that the definition of tragedy as mimesis is connected with its having “been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems.” That is, of course, far more than Aristotle, Castelvetro, or Sidney ever affirmed. Perhaps Plato came closest in the Laws.

9 As he calls it in Of Education.

10 Paraeus is appealed to as a commentator on Revelation, not as a theorist of literature.

11 See “Milton on Style,” Cornell Library Journal, 9 (1969), 39–58.

12 The index to Allan H. Gilbert's Literary Criticism: Plato to Dry den (New York: American Book, 1940) is especially helpful on these matters.