I. In 1888, as a young man, William Butler Yeats found himself in a novel predicament. Having come to his first séance in the hope of making contact with spirits, he felt a tremor, a spasm, a convulsion that flung him into the wall. The circle thought he must be a medium. He steadied himself and sat back at the table. Awaking from mesmerized sleep, the medium leading the circle warned of great danger and began trying to ward off the spirits. Yeats convulsed and broke the table, his friend prayed to the Virgin and the Father. Knowing no prayers in the moment, Yeats declaimed the opening lines of Paradise Lost — and all was still. No episode better illustrates the changing climate of faith for English-language poets near the turn of the century. Yeats’ experience is of a world animated by mysterious forces unmediated by the old institutions. His explanation afterward is agnostic between faith in the spirits and the suspicion that they might have been imagined. And yet, when beset by bad spirits, his recourse is to formal invocation of a divine figure, not the Father summoned in the Lord’s Prayer but the heavenly muse summoned in the first lines of Milton’s epic. Faith, once widely received, had become an uncertain inheritance. The same would shortly happen to Milton. Those of us who have not made a study of our literature might find it hard to imagine Milton’s stature as of the late nineteenth century. In Milton, a popular biography of 1879, Mark Pattison pronounced Milton’s first collection “the finest flower of English poesy.” That book, from 1645, contained Milton’s inimitable elegy “Lycidas,” for Pattison the singular “high-water mark of English Poesy.” A year after the appearance of Pattison’s volume, Matthew Arnold, the most eminent critic at the time in England and for later generations the hollow donkey to blame for most every excess of “Victorianism,” declared Shakespeare and Milton the two “poetical classics” of English literature, the standards against which other verse might be judged. Arnold went a step farther in the year of Yeats’ séance, praising Milton expressly at Shakespeare’s expense, as “by his diction and rhythm the one artist of the highest rank in the great style whom we have.” The great testament to Milton’s centrality is Arnold’s assurance in pronouncing his style the better of Shakespeare’s: “This I take as requiring no discussion, this I take as certain.” (Arnold was like that.) Such was Milton’s authority that Arnold saw no need to argue the point that Yeats would invoke it to set the room still. The regard professed by Arnold and revealed by Yeats is in line with the reception of Milton that had prevailed for over two centuries. The tradition was reverential but far from uncritical. Yeats’ father held with Arnold that Milton dealt in abstract opinion to the detriment of his verse, and Arnold was far from first or last to entertain doubts about the theology and the probity of Paradise Lost. Still, two hundred years after Milton’s death, an elderly Robert Browning was representative of the tradition’s esteem in keeping a portrait of Milton in his study, just as a younger Browning had been representative in slighting an elder poet by contrast with the heroic example of Milton. “Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,” Browning wrote in 1845 in “The Lost Leader,” his broadside against an unnamed poet whom everyone understood to be Wordsworth, accusing Wordsworth of abandoning the cause of British freedom in a rough paraphrase of the latter’s famous encomium to the cause from a sonnet of 1815: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held. In the same year in which Browning wrote “The Lost Leader,” his beloved Elizabeth Barrett, soon to be Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wrote him a letter with the purest distillation of the reverence that Milton inspired in his heirs: “Our inferiority is not in what we can do, but in what we are. We should write poems like Milton if [we] lived them like Milton.” His superiority as a poet was tied inextricably to the faith that he embodied and lived. Robert Browning, given a lock of Milton’s hair, placed it with a lock of Elizabeth’s. Across the Atlantic, Emerson celebrated “Shakspeare and Milton” in a breath as emblematic of English poetic genius: “its poetry is common sense inspired; or iron raised to white heat.” This last phrase may have served as inspiration for Dickinson (“Dare you see a soul/ at the White Heat?”), who in any case knew her Milton profoundly. His work had been a fixture of New England literary culture as long as it had existed and shows up in the poetry and prose of every canonical author in the mid-century American Renaissance. Longfellow’s short poem “Milton” praised the poet, “England’s Mæonides” (that is, England’s Homer), for the “mighty” song that “floods all the soul” like the resounding waves that leave the sand gold. Preceding this in England by a dozen years was Tennyson’s short poem “Milton,” which praised the poet, “O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies . . . God-gifted organ-voice of England,” for the distant echoes of his thundering song quietly felt in the sunset on an “ambrosial ocean isle.” As Longfellow echoed Tennyson’s rather mawkish mellifluousness, Whitman echoed Shelley and Blake in numbering Milton’s Satan among the immortal types of world literature. For Shelley, Blake, and every English poet of the Romantic generations beginning in the late eighteenth century, their own achievement is inconceivable without the example of the man Wordsworth called “That mighty orb of song,/ The divine Milton,” the “voice whose sound was as the sea” — “our great Poet.” The epithet had also been applied to Milton in the most influential work on aesthetics from the British eighteenth century, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in 1757. The young Burke quotes
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