Milton and the muse-haters: 'Ad patrem,' 'L'Allegro/Il Penseroso,' and the ambivalences of poetry - poet John Milton

Criticism, Wntr, 1995 by Peter C. Herman

James also said: "the man who wrote this [masque], though I dare call him a very skillful poet, yet seems uncomfortable in the imaginations of his heart and unhappy in the acuteness of his mind."

- Robert Graves, Wife to Mr. Milton(1)

In the sixth chapter of his line-by-line refutation of the Eikon Basilike, Milton dismisses the rationale for Charles's retirement from Westminster with an argument that is peculiar, to say the least, for someone who had written a masque, published a book of poems, frequently advertised his epic ambitions, and eventually would write Paradise Lost:(2)

The Simily wherwith he begins I was about to have found fault with, as in a garb somewhat more Poetical then for a Statist: but meeting with many straines of like dress in other of his Essaies, and hearing him reported a more diligent reader of Poets, then of Politicians, I begun to think that the whole Book might be intended a peece of Poetrie. The words are good, the fiction smooth and cleanly; there wanted onely Rime, and that, they say, is bestow'd upon it lately.

Not only does this passage jar with Milton's literary accomplishments, it contradicts one of the prime conventions of Renaissance poetics - that poetry contains models of virtuous behavior benefitting both the rulers and the ruled.

Clearly, as Steven Zwicker has argued, such aspersions against poetry could not have come easily to Milton, and they reveal the complex nexus of politics, aesthetics, and authority circa 1649.(3) One might dismiss this passage as irrelevant to Milton's poems through recourse to the Renaissance tradition of forensic rhetoric. According to this argument, Charles's literary tastes afford Milton the opportunity to use against him the common charge that poetry is "far unworthy the serious expense of an exact gentleman's time."(4) The demands of the occasion, in other words, outweigh the contradiction to Milton's own practice. However, the suspicion of the imagination permeating Eikonoklastes suggests that this strategy is of more than merely rhetorical importance to Milton,(5) rather, it argues that both he and his audience considered antipoetic sentiment weighty enough to strip a king of his authority. Far from a prejudice shared by only zealots and fools, antipoetic sentiment constituted a powerful, compelling discourse that demanded respect and, as I have argued elsewhere, it functioned as "shaping presence" in many other Renaissance writers whom Milton esteemed, most notably Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare.(6)

Consequently, this passage raises the important and as yet unasked question of how Milton confronted antipoetic sentiment in his own poetry. But before I explore how this discourse inflects Ad Patrem, and L'Allegro/Il Penseroso, I will first briefly explain some of its history.

Antipoetic sentiment's authority stemmed partly from its sheer popularity and partly from its religious genealogy.(7) Attacks on poetry first entered England's popular culture when the earliest English Protestants started using them in their attack against Catholicism.(8) William Tyndale, for example, contemptuously dismissed all the accoutrements of Catholicism with the phrase "[they] gave themselves only unto poetry, and shut up the scripture."(9) Interestingly, anti-poetic sentiment grew in tandem with the flourishing of English Renaissance poetry, perhaps suggesting a symbiotic relationship. The year 1579 witnessed the publication of both Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender and Stephen Gosson's first attack on fiction, The Schoole of Abuse, which in turn occasioned Sidney's private, highly equivocal response, The Apology for Poetry.(10) The relative stature of poetics and antipoetics may be gleaned from the fact that Spenser felt compelled to publish the Calender anonymously whereas London's authorities not only commissioned Gosson's work, but forbade the licencing of any rebuttals.(11)

The "war against poetry," as Russell Fraser aptly calls it, continued to rage throughout the seventeenth century. An astonishing letter written by Nicholas Ferrar in 1637 describing his brother's last wishes testifies to the danger he thought secular poetry posed to his soul:(12)

When you have measured out the place for my grave, then goe and take out of my Study, those three great Hampers full of Bookes that have there locked up these many yeares: They were not many scores but many Hundreths in all kind of Languages, which he had in all places gotten with great search and some cost. They were Comedies, Tragedies, Love-Hymns, Heroicall Poems, and such like. Carry (sayd he) those Hampers to the place of my grave, and upon it, see you burn them all: and this he spake with some vehemency and passion and Indignation. Goe, Let it be done. Let it be done.

Chaucer may have retracted his works, but so far as we know he never ordered his library burned. The concommitant attacks on drama, which always stretched to include all manner of "feigning, culminated in the publication of William Prynne's Histrio-Mastix in 1633 and the closing of the theatres in 1642.(13) Furthermore, a new front in the pamphlet war against poetry opened up in the seventeenth century. The defenders of poetry now had to contend with those (e.g. Francis Bacon) who believed that metaphors and poetry clouded rather than clarified the truth.(14)