The Wall Street Journal-20080201-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Review - Books- Cosmic and Sublime

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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Review / Books: Cosmic and Sublime

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THE COMPLETE POETRY AND ESSENTIAL PROSE OF JOHN MILTON

Edited by William Kerrigan, John Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon

(Modern Library, 1,365 pages, $55)

John Milton was born in London in December 1608. Over the coming months, his 400th anniversary will be celebrated in many different ways, but it is highly unlikely that any of the tributes he receives will do as much for him as the appearance of the Modern Library edition of his collected poetry and selected prose.

The edition is a model of its kind, well designed and attractively produced. There are scholarly but unintimidating footnotes and helpful introductions to the major works. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized -- a difficult decision but the right one. The long pages of continuous verse, which could have looked daunting, are easy on the eye (not least thanks to ample leading between the lines). A great deal has been packed in, but Milton has still been left room to breathe.

The whole enterprise is meant to be reader-friendly, and it succeeds. Yet one can't help wondering how many readers are going to avail themselves of the invitation it extends.

No one disputes that Milton is a great poet. But for many readers today, that might be part of the problem -- not his stature as such but the fact that he is so strenuously, so oppressively great. There are other great poets in English, but most of them, beginning with Shakespeare, wear their greatness fairly lightly. By contrast, Milton will settle for nothing less than the cosmic and the sublime. As the Germans would say, he is kolossal.

Admittedly he was much more human and approachable in his early poems than he became later on. The celebrations of cheerfulness and thoughtfulness in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" are long-established favorites. (Dr. Johnson claimed that "every man who reads them reads them with pleasure.") Much of the writing in the masque "Comus" has an Elizabehan richness. The elegy "Lycidas" combines a majestic command of literary precedents with personal urgency and irresistible melody. These are major achievements. But if you accept the traditional view of Milton, they are still only stepping stones on the path toward his later masterworks, "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes" -- on the path toward "Paradise Lost" above all.

Twentieth-century modernism, however, had little time for traditional views, and in the 1920s a sharp anti-Milton reaction set in, most famously promoted by T.S. Eliot but supported by a number of other powerful voices as well. The chief complaints of these detractors were directed against Milton's style. It was condemned as monotonous, stilted and overblown. It stood accused of hollow grandeur.

This is a central issue for Milton's reputation. If a poet's words don't work, nothing else about his writing will. And the most valuable result of the anti-Miltonist campaign was the counter-reaction that it produced. Later critics, provoked into examining Milton's language more closely, have revealed a rich multiplicity of wordplay and subtle verbal effects. Far from being loose and rhetorical, his lines are saturated with meaning.

The Modern Library editors don't have space for most of the finer points elucidated by earlier commentators, but they offer enough examples to give readers a good idea of what to look out for. In "Paradise Lost," to take a single small instance, the serpent as it first approaches Eve is "voluble and bold, now hid, now seen." In their footnote the editors confine themselves to explaining that "voluble" is being used in its original Latin sense, to mean "rolling along." But in their preface to the poem they make the further point (borrowed, with due acknowledgment, from the critic Christopher Ricks) that voluble in its modern sense -- "talkative" -- is what the serpent is about to become.

If Milton's poetry lives in its minutiae, as all true poetry does, it also achieves an astonishingly broad sweep. Teachers who hope to get younger readers interested in Milton sometimes commend "Paradise Lost" as a forerunner of science fiction. If you have read it, you can see why. But Milton's science fiction has the weight of Christian and classical tradition behind it, and however vivid his inventions are -- the space flights, the building of the city of Pandemonium -- they are secondary to his moral and emotional themes.

Milton's ideas, and the part they play in his poetry, have prompted endless argument among his interpreters. The Modern Library editors survey some of the major claims, from the view, first put forward by William Blake, that in "Paradise Lost" Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it," to the more recent, feminist-dominated debates about the poet's portrayal of Eve. Generally the editors occupy the judicious middle ground, which is no doubt the right thing for them to do. But as a result they tend to leave an inadequate impression of the enormous tensions that are present in Milton and that give his work much of its dynamism.

You may not go all the way with Blake, but you still have to admit that when Milton writes about Satan he is suspiciously good -- unsurpassed, in fact -- at dramatizing ambition, defiance and the naked will to power. And other signs of divided sympathies were evident from early on -- between classicist and Christian, for instance, and between eroticism and righteousness. In the marvelous ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," which was written when Milton was only 21 (and which Dylan Thomas once said was his favorite English poem), the greatest tenderness and pathos are reserved for the passage in which a group of nymphs mourn as a pagan god is banished forever by the new order.

About a quarter of the Modern Library volume is devoted to a selection of the prose works that preoccupied Milton, at the expense of his poetry, for nearly 20 years, from the beginning of the English Civil War to the end of Cromwell's protectorate. Milton was an egoist but by no means an introvert: He believed that poets, like everyone else, should be active citizens, and he plunged into the conflicts that tore his society apart in the 1640s -- first as an independent pamphleteer and then, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, as "Latin secretary" of the new council of the state and an official apologist for the Commonwealth regime. In the latter role he became known throughout Europe.

There are some magnificent flights of eloquence in Milton's prose, and some racy satire. His tracts have obvious historical importance, and sometimes -- when he writes about popular sovereignty, for instance, or about educational reform -- he can still speak directly to posterity. Above all his pamphlet "Areopagitica" will remain a sacred text for anyone who believes in free speech -- not so much for the limited applications of the doctrine that he proposes as for the fervor with which he upholds the general principle.

On the whole, however, his controversial prose is best left to scholars. It is too often mired in the politics of his own time and too often marred by the low techniques of the propagandist. In this respect the fall of the Commonwealth, while it brought Milton's political hopes crashing down, also represented literary salvation. It turned him back from pamphleteering to poetry. Without it, we might never have had "Paradise Lost."

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Mr. Gross, a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is the author of "The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters."