Possessed by Memory

by Harold Bloom

  Milton, Satan, Eve, and Adam move us as God the Father and God the Son do not. The fifth personage who matters in the poem is the Spirit, who is and is not Milton. The invocations to books I, III, VII, and IX are the work of the Spirit. They are John Milton’s soliloquies on the model of Hamlet’s. Satan’s soliloquies also echo Hamlet’s, but they are agonized, whereas Milton’s are agonistic.

  The pragmatic theodicy of Paradise Lost might be phrased: to justify the ways of John Milton to Milton. Justification here means eternal poetic fame in the mode of what E. R. Curtius terms “Poetry as Perpetuation.” Curtius quotes Jacob Burckhardt: “The poet-philologist in Italy already has…the most intense consciousness that he is a distributor of fame and indeed of immortality; and likewise of oblivion.” Dante, whose stance was at the apex of the culture of the Latin Middle Ages, was Milton’s most dangerous overt precursor. Since Shakespeare is the hidden God of Milton, as of almost all the poetry of the Western canonical tradition, he stands apart. Milton absorbed Dante—Shakespeare’s only rival in high literature—but, like Goethe to follow, did so only with a certain repugnance.

  When I recite Dante and Milton to myself during long sleepless nights, the resemblance between their temperaments disturbs me. Both are savage. Shakespeare’s wisdom is humane; theirs is not. Dante’s relation to Christian doctrine ought to be more of a scandal than it is. These days I try to be patient with well-meaning exegetes who seek spiritual consolation in all three. Secular strength and splendor are palpable in Shakespeare. What I hear in Dante, as in Milton, is a violent personalism that persuasively redefines Scripture so that their own work completes and to some degree negates it.

  Dante the Pilgrim is totally silent when Ulysses speaks out of the forked tongue of fire that he shares with Diomedes. Evidently he recognizes his own deep similarity to the final voyage of Ulysses, which seeks to go beyond the limits of the known and of the permitted. Dante the Poet seeks a beyond yet further into the realm of newness. Milton travels into the primal abyss and takes us there with him.

  Comus:

  The Shadow of Shakespeare

  WHAT WE CALL John Milton’s minor poems are, at their best, major in every sense. Compared with Paradise Lost, only Chaucer and Shakespeare, of all English poets, would suffer no diminishment. Milton’s epic crowds out his other poetry. This is inevitable but perhaps unfortunate.

  I confess a lack of pleasure when I reread Paradise Regained. But Samson Agonistes holds its own even in the company of Paradise Lost. Of Milton’s other poems, Comus and Lycidas are in a class apart, but so indeed are “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” The English sonnets are sometimes limited, but the full Miltonic voice is heard in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.”

  Elsewhere in Possessed by Memory I render homage to Samson Agonistes. Here I turn to Comus, which I discussed almost daily with my friend Angus Fletcher in the late 1960s. Fletcher’s book on Comus, The Transcendental Masque (1971), seems to me now neglected, but I think it will survive as a radiant disclosure by a visionary critic fully comparable to Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye.

  Fletcher centers upon the riddle of virginity in Comus. For the young Milton it is a mode of freedom. Yet it is a curiously limited freedom. Here is the Lady defying Comus:

  I had not thought to have unlockt my lips

  In this unhallow’d air, but that this Jugler

  Would think to charm my judgement, as mine eyes,

  Obtruding false rules pranckt in reasons garb.

  I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,

  And vertue has no tongue to check her pride:

  Impostor do not charge most innocent nature,

  As if she would her children should be riotous

  With her abundance, she good cateress

  Means her provision onely to the good

  That live according to her sober laws,

  And holy dictate of spare Temperance:

  If every just man that now pines with want

  Had but a moderate and beseeming share

  Of that which lewdly-pamper’d Luxury

  Now heaps upon som few with vast excess,

  Natures full blessings would be well dispenc’t

  In unsuperfluous eeven proportion,

  And she no whit encomber’d with her store,

  And then the giver would be better thank’t,

  His praise due paid, for swinish gluttony

  Ne’re looks to Heav’n amidst his gorgeous feast,

  But with besotted base ingratitude

  Cramms, and blasphemes his feeder. Shall I go on?

  Or have I said anough? To him that dares

  Arm his profane tongue with contemptuous words

  Against the Sun-clad power of Chastity,

  Fain would I somthing say, yet to what end?

  Thou hast nor Eare nor Soul to apprehend

  The sublime notion, and high mystery

  That must be utter’d to unfold the sage

  And serious doctrine of Virginity,

  And thou art worthy that thou shouldst not know

  More happines then this thy present lot.

  Enjoy your deer Wit, and gay Rhetorick

  That hath so well been taught her dazling fence,

  Thou art not fit to hear thy self convinc’t;

  Yet should I try, the uncontrouled worth

  Of this pure cause would kindle my rap’t spirits

  To such a flame of sacred vehemence,

  That dumb things would be mov’d to sympathise,

  And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake,

  Till all thy magick structures rear’d so high,

  Were shatter’d into heaps o’re thy false head.

  Comus, lines 756–99

  “The sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity” is now so far out of fashion that most of us might find it difficult to comprehend Milton’s theme. For Fletcher, the Lady’s virginity is a doctrine of the self. In this speech she discovers and is delighted by her own power of rhetoric. She suddenly sees that her virginity is the emblem of her own transcendental self. Her defiance establishes her personality. And yet her freedom is shadowed.

  Comus, though defeated, still exercises the power of his wand over the Lady. She remains silent and bound. Sabrina, a virgin nymph, will liberate her. Spenser, acknowledged by Milton as his poetic father, tells the story of Sabrina in book 2 of the Faerie Queen 2.10.14–19.

  There is a gentle Nymph not farr from hence,

  That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream,

  Sabrina is her name, a Virgin pure,

  Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,

  That had the Sceptre from his father Brute.

  She, guiltless damsell, flying the mad pursuit

  Of her enraged stepdam Guendolen,

  Commended her fair innocence to the flood

  That stay’d her flight with his cross-flowing course.

  The water Nymphs that in the bottom plaid,

  Held up their pearled wrists and took her in,

  Bearing her straight to aged Nereus’ Hall,

  Who piteous of her woes, rear’d her lank head,

  And gave her to his daughters to imbathe

  In nectar’d lavers strew’d with Asphodil,

  And through the porch and inlet of each sense

  Dropt in Ambrosial Oils till she reviv’d,

  And underwent a quick immortal change

  Made Goddess of the River; still she retains

  Her maid’n gentlenes, and oft at Eeve

  Visits the herds along the twilight meadows,

  Helping all urchin blasts, and ill luck signes

  That the shrewd medling Elf delights to ma
ke,

  Which she with pretious viold liquors heals.

  For which the Shepherds at their festivals

  Carrol her goodnes loud in rustick layes,

  And throw sweet garland wreaths into her stream

  Of pancies, pinks, and gaudy Daffadils.

  And, as the old Swain said, she can unlock

  The clasping charm, and thaw the numming spell,

  If she be right invok’t in warbled Song,

  For maid’nhood she loves, and will be swift

  To aid a Virgin, such as was her self

  In hard besetting need, this will I try

  And adde the power of som adjuring verse.

  Comus, lines 824–58

  Song is the key. In some sense, Sabrina is Spenserian poetry. Shakespeare is so pervasive in Comus that one wonders whether the young Milton is in control of allusiveness in regard to his greatest precursor. Reading through Comus, you are in an echo chamber dominated by Shakespeare. Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest are heard throughout, but there are traces also of Hamlet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Besides Spenser, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, and William Browne contribute to the rich texture of Milton’s masque.

  Angus Fletcher and I spent a good deal of time discussing a particular exchange between Isabella and Claudio in Measure for Measure:

  ISABELLA What says my brother?

  CLAUDIODeath is a fearful thing.

  ISABELLA And shamed life a hateful.

  CLAUDIO Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

  To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

  This sensible warm motion to become

  A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

  To bath in fiery floods, or to reside

  In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

  To be imprison’d in the viewless winds

  And blown with restless violence round about

  The pendant world: or to be worse than worst

  Of those that lawless and incertain thought

  Imagine howling—’tis too horrible.

  The weariest and most loathed worldly life

  That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

  Can lay on nature, is a paradise

  To what we fear of death.

  Act 3, Scene 1

  This deeply influences Belial’s speech in book II of Paradise Lost, where the crafty fallen angel argues for inaction:

  And that must end us, that must be our cure,

  To be no more; sad cure; for who would lose,

  Though full of pain, this intellectual being,

  Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,

  To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost

  In the wide womb of uncreated Night,

  Devoid of sense and motion?

  Milton seems unaware that Belial is haunted by Claudio. The two situations have little in common, and I would have to judge that Milton’s echo of Shakespeare is unintentional. Is this a fault? The question is profound. I have no single answer, but it bothers me, just as Manoa speaking of his son Samson echoes Mark Antony brooding on “the miserable change” in his fortune. Again, the echo works against Milton’s purposes.

  Dr. Samuel Johnson,

  Life of Milton

  THE STRONGEST CRITIC in Western literary culture is Dr. Samuel Johnson. Throughout my long life, he has been my model, though I am aware I cannot achieve his intellect, knowledge, and energy. Johnson teaches me that criticism, as a literary art, belongs to the ancient genre of wisdom writing.

  Johnson’s precursors include Aristotle and Ben Jonson, but primarily his forerunner is Koheleth (Ecclesiastes):

  Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

  Ecclesiastes 9:10

  I constantly reread Koheleth, in Hebrew and in English, and sometimes believe I am reading Johnson:

  It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools.

  For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.

  Ecclesiastes 7:5–6

  The deepest lesson I have learned from Johnson is that any authority of criticism as a literary genre must depend on the human wisdom of the critic, and not upon the wrongness or rightness of either theory or praxis. It is because of Johnson’s example that I’ve learned that the literary will to power over language can make its way only through diction, a choice of words that pragmatically becomes a series of choices in language. Johnson was a critic both of power, which he called invention, and of the will to diction, and he understood the reflection of power by choice of language better than any critic has been able to convey since.

  Johnson’s greatest work as a critic is The Lives of the Poets, composed between 1777 and 1781. Yet this work is very curious, since the Lives are introductions to a strange collection of the British poets, chosen mostly by the booksellers and not by Johnson himself. There are fifty poets—Oliver Goldsmith, who was a friend of Jonson’s, is oddly excluded—and they are frequently a rabblement of poetasters: Pomfret, Dorset, Sprat, Stepney, Roscommon, Fenton, Lyttelton, and the egregious Yalden. Alas, poor Yalden! We remember him now, if at all, only for the rather grand Johnsonian sentence that concludes his Life:

  Of his other poems it is sufficient to say that they deserve perusal, though they are not always exactly polished, though the rhymes are sometimes very ill sorted, and though his faults seem rather the omissions of idleness than the negligences of enthusiasm.

  Before that, Johnson quoted Yalden’s unfortunate line in which Yahweh contemplates the newly created Light:

  A while th’ Almighty wondering stood.

  Alas, poor Yalden! We can never forget the Johnsonian observation upon this:

  He ought to have remembered that Infinite Knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon Ignorance.

  Certainly the masterpiece of the Lives is the beautiful meditation upon Alexander Pope. For Johnson, Pope was the prince of poets. As I age, my own love for Pope has increased, and I begin to understand him better. Yet to me the central distinction of the Lives is the ambivalent and powerful Milton. Johnson was a royalist and a fierce adherent to Anglicanism. Milton’s politics and religious stance were abhorrent to the great critic, yet Milton’s poetic strength overcame Johnson’s revulsion.

  It is fascinating to see, in the Life of Milton, Johnson balancing his religious distaste with his superb apprehension of poetic achievement. Even stronger is his aversion to Milton’s politics. Johnson calls Milton “an acrimonious and surly republican.” It is unworthy of Johnson that he judges Milton’s republicanism as “an envious hatred of greatness.” Johnson rises to his proper height when he comes to Paradise Lost. He calls it the first of all poems in design, and in performance second only to Homer.

  * * *

  —

  Before Johnson attempts a critical account of Paradise Lost, he makes a marvelous statement on the nature of poetry:

  By the general consent of criticks the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason. Epick poetry undertakes to teach the most important truths by the most pleasing precepts, and therefore relates some great event in the most affecting manner. History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration, which he must improve and exalt by a nobler art, must animate by dramatick energy, and diversify by retrospection and anticipation; morality must teach h
im the exact bounds and different shades of vice and virtue; from policy and the practice of life he has to learn the discriminations of character and the tendency of the passions, either single or combined; and physiology must supply him with illustrations and images. To put these materials to poetical use is required an imagination capable of painting nature and realizing fiction. Nor is he yet a poet till he has attained the whole extension of his language, distinguished all the delicacies of phrase, and all the colours of words, and learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation.

  An epic poet would have to be formidable indeed to satisfy Johnson’s criteria. Milton more than passes the test. I cannot think of a better description of Milton’s art than that it animates by dramatic energy, and diversifies by retrospection and anticipation.

  * * *

  —

  Johnson goes on to identify the authentic distinction of Paradise Lost:

  The subject of an epick poem is naturally an event of great importance. That of Milton is not the destruction of a city, the conduct of a colony, or the foundation of an empire. His subject is the fate of worlds, the revolutions of heaven and of earth; rebellion against the Supreme King raised by the highest order of created beings; the overthrow of their host and the punishment of their crime; the creation of a new race of reasonable creatures; their original happiness and innocence, their forfeiture of immortality, and their restoration to hope and peace.

  Great events can be hastened or retarded only by persons of elevated dignity. Before the greatness displayed in Milton’s poem all other greatness shrinks away. The weakest of his agents are the highest and noblest of human beings, the original parents of mankind; with whose actions the elements consented; on whose rectitude or deviation of will depended the state of terrestrial nature and the condition of all the future inhabitants of the globe.