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The literary forms of the modern literature
would have their beginnings in the Restoration period, when English literature
faces the new scientific and philosophical concepts. There are new social
and economic conditions that provoke the disappearance of patronage, there
is a great quantity of readers and this way there is a formation of a literary
market. The new literary forms are: novel, biography, history, travel writings
and journalism.
Charles II and his court had brought back from their exile a love for French
wit, gallantry, elegance and artistic ability, and London became an European
capital of high civilization. The creation of the Royal Society affected
deeply the intellectual temper of the age. It has been regarded as significant
and even a materialistic bent of the English mind that, while in the seventeenth
century France created in the Academié Française a literary
foundation, England organized a society for scientific research, although
the English Royal Society were concerned itself in more than scientific
experimentation.
A new political feelings emerged in some way cinical and self-seeking, although
marked by increasing toleration and humanity. From the restoration of the
monarchy in 1660, the English poetry becomes very classical in form and
content up to 1750. This was the period of Milton, Wycherley and Dryden.
These ones adopted the Greco-Latin models, which they used in traditional
lyric. During this period satire was the favourite form for many poets,
and the favourite meter was the heroic couple.
Concerning drama, after a parenthesis of twelve years without any performance
in England due to Cromwell, the restoration of the monarchy of Charles II
brought a new period in which comedy dominated theatre halls. The Restoration
comedy was performed with a very selected audience: aristocracy and bourgeoisie.
It was performed in an enclosed roofed place, usually quite small and comfortable,
which made intimacy possible, and actors were very close to the audience.
The comedies are written in prose, and the companies included women in their
cast. These comedies are more realistic and reproduce the manner and behaviour
of the social classes that pay to see them. The language is conversational,
full of ingenious sentences and misunderstandings. The character are cultivated,
refined, pretentious, hypocritical, and lascivious. They only worry about
sex and money. This kind of comedy is known as ‘comedy of manners’,
and the best example is Wycheley’s The Country Wife (1674).
1.1. Milton’s early poems.
In 1628 Milton wrote the earliest of his
English poems with the title The Death of a Fair Infant. It is an elegy
to his niece Ann. His first great poem was On the Morning of Christ Nativity,
which he wrote shortly after his 21st birthday. This poem may be taken as
a kind of announcement of his poetical maturity, both in its religious theme
and control of conception and form as well as in image and rhythm.
L’Allegro is an invocation to the Godess Mirth, to allow the poet to
live with her, first with the delights of pastoral scenes, then with the
delights of the cities. The happy lines in which Milton describes a day
in the life of a cheerful person show appropiate mythological and pastoral
imaginary developed in order to build up a mood of contented living: the
careful picture of the vine covered rustic cottage, milkmaids singing, mowers
wheting with their scythes , and sheperds making love under hawthorns .
Of course the poem is full of light and movement. The picture is in chronological
order, beginning with the multicolor dawn, rising to the accompanient of
the lark song. It goes through a day of cheerful pastoral activity until
the sunset turns L’Allegro’s thoughts to pageants, poetry and
music.
Il Penseroso. The images are organized to present a mood contemplation and
great intellectual activity. The colour is darker than in L’Allegro:
moonlight and dark woods are appropiate symbols here. The images in Il Penseroso
are the counterparts of L’Allegro.
Both poems are shaped as representations of opposed states of mind. L’Allegro
seems to avoid melancholy, and Il Penseroso tends to the cultivated. The
first one turns actibly to public mirth , and the second one to the private
pleasures of contemplative life. The verse form of the two poems is the
same; octosyllabic couplets. The pace of Il Penseroso is slower. Music is
a pleasure in both poems, but in Il Penseroso is associated to religion
and study.
Comus. It has a long title: Comus, a Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634;
on Michael Masse Night before the Right Honourable John Earl of Bridgewater,
Lord President of Wales.
A mask is a semi dramatic play forming part of a larger celebration or party
or dance in honour of any important person. It has a mythological theme
and always a reference to the person in honour of whom the party is being
celebrated.
The work was first printed anonymously and without title in 1637. Its purpose
was to celebrate the Earl of Bridgewater’s entrance in the presidency
of Wales. Several roles of the mask were played by members of his family.
Comus has been generally accepted as a mask. Margaret Drabble says: "Although
described as a mask, Comus depends little on spectacle and has been better
as a pastoral drama". Comus himself is a pagan god invented by Milton,
son of Bacchus and Circe, who attacks travellers and transforms their faces
to those wild beasts by means of a magic liquor.
Comus is Milton’s first poem in blank verse, and the only thing of
any importance he wrote before Paradise Lost.
Brooke and Shaaher (two critics) say: "Comus is a true mask, because
it combines the usual elements of personal compliment , classic story, and
opulent songs. As a mask it was meant to be sung and acted, and without
music it would lose a great deal".
Comus is the first dramatizing of his great themes: the conflicts of good
and evil.
Lycidas. It is a pastoral elegy on the death of King Edward. He was a friend
of Milton in Cambridge. Lycidas is a formal and personal statement of grief
. It follows the conventions of the classical pastoral elegies, and it is
generally considered one of the finest elegiac poems in the English literature,
and a work of great originality. King Edward was drowned in the Irish Sea,
and this event forced Milton to face the general question of early death
on talented and dedicated young people. As a dedicated man himself, Milton
saw the implications of the king’s death. By adopting the traditional
form of pastoral elegy, Milton was able to bring together his concepts of
priesthood and bardship in the single symbolic figure of the good sheperd
who pipes and tends his flock . Lycidas shows a mature poet at work through
the treatment of the verse paragraphs, the placing of the rhythms, the varying
of the line lengths, and all the devices he uses in order to combine the
ceremonial with the personal without limiting the substance of the poem.
1.2. Milton’s Political Commitment.
Milton declared his Puritan devotion and
loyalty already in his poem Lycidas. In the years between 1641-1660, he
gave himself wholly, to pamphletering in the cause of religious and civil
liberty. He was a dedicated poet, though the necessities of the time might
take him temporally into other kinds of writing. His first five pamphlets,
written in 1641-2, were contributions to the attack made on prelacy in the
Anglican Church by a group of Presbyterian ministers. The attack was directed
mainly against the episcopal hierarchy, the Book of Common Prayer and ritual
The main thought in Milton’s antiprelatical pamphlets was that the
English reformation had not been completed in Tudor times, and now was the
time to complete it. Notory and fame came in 1643, with Milton’s The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, followed by three more tracts in 1644
and 1645 on the same theme. His discussion was probably hastened by his
own marital disasters. In the tracts, Milton argued that the sole cause
for divorce, that is adultery, might be less valid than incompatibility,
and that the forced constraint of a marriage without love was a crime against
human dignity. Milton’s first defence of divorce provoked much opposition,
which led him to write the three further pamphlets in a more controversial
way.
The most important pamphlet by Milton was first published in 1644is On Education.
It was a long line of European expositions of Renaissance Humanism. Milton’s
aim was to educate boys as enlightened, cultivated, responsible citizens,
in a word, as leaders. He trained an elite in regional academies of about
130 pupils, with a staff of about 20 employees. His educational ideal was
a Christian humanist one. The large curricula students had to prepare are
impossible for modern standards. However, Milton is concerned with training
a ruling class of specially talented people. Milton sees his pupils as having
scientific and practical knowledge through reading Latin and Greek works,
since he saw classical culture not only as a source of "sweetness and
light", but as a means of instruction in the material themes of civilization.
He wrote a tract on the freedom of the press: Aeropagitica. He writes as
a scholar and poet, as a lover of books, and reasserts above all his belief
in the power of truth through free inquiry and discussion. His highly individualistic
behaviour led him to present arguments that, while familiar in nineteenth
century, were unfamiliar in seventeenth century.
In 1649, right after the execution of Charles I, he published his first
political pamphlet: The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. He holds here the
doctrine that the power resides always in the people. People delegate this
power power to a sovereign, but if he abuses of this power, people may depose
or even execute the tyrant.
In 1651 begins his European stage with the publication in Latin of his work
Defence of People of England. It has a second part celebrating the achievements
of the Commonwealth leaders. In 1659, he writes two more tracts on church
and state. The first on titled A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical
Causes. Here he argues for religious freedom, except for Roman Catholics,
since catholicism had shown as a danger of national security.
Milton had never been satisfied with any sort of Church establishment. His
highly individualistic teperament reinforced the protestant view of every
man with his Bible contrasting his own path to God.
His last political pamphlet defending a Republic was in 1660, right before
the restoration of Charles II. It was titled The Readie and Easie Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth. The pamphlet arouse interest and produced
replies. A second enlarged edition appeared on the very eve of the restoration
when any possibility of a new Republican form of government had vanished.
Charles II brought all Milton’s political hopes to an end destroying
at the same time his vision of a reform and a regenerated England which
had sustained him for so long.
1.3. Milton’s Major Works.
Paradise Lost was begun to be written sometime
between 1655-1658. It was finished in 1665, and was first published in 1667.
It was published in ten books. There are other reissues in 1668 and 1669,
adding the prefatory notes on his use of blank verse, and adding also the
arguments.
There was a second edition in 1674. It appeared in twelve books, because
two of the first ten books were splitted into two (Books 7 and 10). The
arguments were placed right before the presentation or introduction of each
book.
When Milton comes to write Paradise Lost he is no longer a military revolutionary.
His three major works deal with the temptations, defeats and victories of
the individual man. His early enthusiasm gives way to reasserting in the
face of science and oppresive power, that is, the Christian humanistic view
of God. Eve and Adam re-enact the sin of Satan. It was for pride and rebelliousness.
Its heroic villain, Satan, has a personality of distinction, but in balancing
this with his corruption, Milton could rely upon his audience reactions
to evil.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost following the earlier epic poems; for instance,
Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata,
and Camoen’s Os Lusiadas (1572), revivifying the classical epics. The
images blend the general with the particular, and the style is elevated
above the speech. The reader can easily see the difference between the flat
language of the arguments, and the evocative language of the poem (see example
in page 165 C. P.). In te poem he uses latinism, words from classical origin.
To some extent, Paradise Lost is easier to read for a Latin reader than
for an Anglo-Saxon reader.
Milton’s preface stress the novelty of blank verse for a heroic poem.
Rejecting rhyme as the invention of a barbarous age. The manipulation of
rhythm and sound is one of his supreme achievements. The continuous flow
of long sentences amd paragraphs is natural, and it is like the dramatic
blank verse of Shakespeare’s dialogue. T. S. Eliot says: "Shakespeare
was a modern master of rhythm, and his blank verse is never monotonous."
In the different prints of Paradise Lost, Milton introduces the prefaces
explaining his use of blank verse. Blank verse in a long poem is a radical
novelty , and Milton handles it in large English prosody. The main motives
and events of Paradise Lost had precedents to a greater or lesser degree
through Milton’s handling of them with powerful originality.
As an artist, Milton links himself with the pagan poets, but regularly puts
his Christ’s themes about the pagan ones. The arragements of the incidents
in Milton are determined not by the narrative exposition of the theological
system, but by the gradual reinforcing and intertwining of four central
themes:
1.- University of divine providence.
2.- Reality of evil.
3.- Hope of redemption from evils.
4.- Unity of human race.
What gives the poem the structural unity is the repetition and mutual clarification
of these four themes, not simply the manipulation of the incidents. The
central themes are kept alive sometimes by explicit statements, but more
often by references and allusions. These four themes are not treated separatedly
in different parts of the poem, because Milton was aware of their close
interrelationship. Neither structure nor style in Milton can be discussed
apart from his central preocupation with a mystical vision.
Paradise Lost shows Milton as a Christian humanist using all the resources
of the European literary tradition that had come down to him. These resources
are biblical, classical, medieval, and, of course, from Renaissance. They
are images myths, legends, and stories of all kinds. The geographical imagery
deriving from Milton’s own fascination with books of travels and the
echos of the Elizabethan excitement at the new discoveries. The biblical
stories and doctrines are from Jewish and Christian knowledge.
The first two books of Paradise Lost are the parts that more delight readers.
They are more dramatically conceived, and the richest parts in a literary
sense. Book I shows the fall of the angels in hell, who begin to recover
from their defeat. The speeches of Satan and his followers in Book I and
II are magnificent in their ways. They are Miltonic in the popular sense
of the word (Ciceronian sentence). They represent the attractiveness of
the plausible evil: if evil were not attractive, there would be no problem
for men.
There are description of Satan’s regal state at the beginning of Book
II, and it is a magnificent evocation of all his barbaric splendour. The
scenes in Book III and elsewhere of the poem are the least effective parts
of the work: Milton is too detailed in anthropomorphism. The poem recovers
its magnificence with Satan’s arrival in Eden Book IV, and the fine
symbolism which makes us see Eden in all its unfallen glory. Firstly, through
Satan’s eyes, Milton takes his time in bringing his camera to focus
on Adam and Eve. He moves round the Garden first, showing everything, before
exhibiting us the noble naked dignity of our first parents, always with
Satan acting as the camera eye.
Many times it has been said that Milton used all the epic devices he could
find in classical epic, but the significance of this is not only that he
uses them since he was writing in epic, but he found a way of making most
of these devices work poetically in expanding them.
The meaning of the content of the poem, and these epic devices represent
only a small production of the different means he uses to give poetic effectiveness
to the story, but there are other means: imagery, vocabulary, cadence ,
paragraphs, shifts of tone, etc.
Many critical attention has been spent on pointing up parallels between
Paradise Lost and other epics, instead of emphasizing the highly individual
way with which Milton uses his epic machinery.
The final part of Paradise Lost shows the archangel Michael narrating the
future history of the world to Adam. It begins with the story of Cain’s
first murder to the final picture of the world in the day of the Doom. As
Michael tells the story, Christ’s triumph is not the culmination; but
only an incident in the long story, and, in some respect, a less important
incident than the quiet beauty of the picture of the earth returning to
normal after the Flood. This picture gives a sense of satisfaction in the
process of development of the seasons, and man doing his daily agricultural
labour. Everything in its due time gets us close to the heart of the poem.
® Cromwell Republic (Satan) / Democracy.
Milton
® The King (God) / Absolute power.
In this scheme Christ’s passion and triumph is not highly strengthned.
Among the methods of the language, Milton alternates the use of condesantion
and expansion; and also a high degree of allusiveness is found in the first
eighteen lines of Paradise Lost. The opening sentences are ones of the most
condensed in English, and the contain references to Greek mythology, and
lots of allusions to particular passages in Old and New Testaments. They
are intended to harmonize the reader’s mind to the aspect under which
all the subsequent considerations are rpesented. The first exchange of words
between Satan and Beelzebub is built around varied but subtly appropiate
repetition of the opening scene. Then, it expands its vision, until it includes
the whole fallen army, the meaning of hell, and the dedications of devils
to evil. After the more detailed description of Book II, he returns to another
condensed passage on the central theme, in the great address to "Holy
Light" at the beginning of Book III. Such is Milton’s general
method to embrace everything in the opening, he concentrates everything
in a particular point, expands it, recalls the opening, transfers the scene
of the action, and expands it again: in a word, Milton deals with what are
ostensibly incomprehensible perspectives, stretching outward and inward
in time and space, and his language, remote as it frequently happens in
everyday discourse, both challenges earth-bound concepts and relocates received
images.
Paradise Regained is the natural sequent to the long poem. Christ, the second
Adam, wits back for humanity what the first Adam had lost. The second Adam
has the obedience and integrity deal with the crucifixion, instead, he shows
Christ in the wilderness overcoming Satan. The Temper in what might be called
a ritual re-enaction of the Original Fall. Satan’s motive in tempting
Christ is bound to find out if he is really the Messiah, and tempts him
to destroy his perfection by commiting specific sins. The poem is basically
a debate between Christ and Satan, neither of whom is very similar to the
corresponding figure in Paradise Lost.
Young Christ in Paradise Regained is the most charming figure in the poem.
His divinity is not greatly stressed, but his heroic humanity makes him
the perfect example of the ideal of magnanimity through renunciation of
the world.
Paradise Regained is a much more limited poem than Paradise Lost, as it
deals only with the specific aspect of Christian story in four Books. Although
the poem has been found cold by some readers and critics, nevertheless it
shows all the fire of Milton’s religious and moral passion, and his
reference to true heroism.
Samson Agonistes was published jointly in the same four Books of Paradise
Regained, and it is one of the most powerful and completely satisfying of
Milton’s major works: by far the greatest English drama on the Greek
model. It dramatizes the simple story from the biblical book of The Judges
in the form of a classical tragedy with Aeschylus and Sophocle as models.
It shows Milton using all his stregth, and the accumulate reflections of
a lifetime. The tragedy is in the form of a series of dialogues between
Samson and the different people who come to visit him. The theme is the
process of Samson’s recovery, and each character who visits him represents
different temptations. In the course of the action, Samson gradually recovers
a proper state of mind which combines penitence and recognition of the nature
of his fault, and the justice of his present faith. The action is wholly
psychological. it is a process by which Samson moves from preocupation with
disgraces to unselfish humility and spiritual stregth.
These three poems of faith and fortitude stand out against the rest of the
restoration literature. They represent a kind of triumph of language which
has no parallel in English. Milton lived and worked in three worlds in conflict,
along various fronts: the Medieval, the Renaissance, and the Puritan. It
was Milton’s great achievement to draw on all the three to harmonize
the wide range of medieval believes with the intense seriousness and sense
of responsability of the Puritan mind, and also with the Renaissance discussions
of good life and ideal state. His verse is one of the great vehicles by
which we come to know the cultural, religious, and political virtuality
of his time.
