40 The New York Reviewdeath of a college classmate—Milton’s
youthful rhetorical and poetic produc-
tions are suffused with an inchoate
sense of private purpose. Mo shenska
reads them brilliantly, crafting carefully
researched, richly imagined scenarios
for their composition and drawing out
their constant preoccupation with the
passing of time, especially Milton’s own.
In a 1627 Latin oration at Cambridge,
Milton urged his fellow undergraduates
to “follow close upon the sun in all his
journeys, and ask account of time itself
and demand the reckoning of its eter-
nal passage,” lest they remain all their
lives “hesitat[ing], as at a cross- roads,
in doubt whether to turn or what di-
rection to choose, and unable to make
any decision.” But two years later, his
first major poem in English, the “Ode
on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,”
ends with an image of patient fixity, as
the infant Christ sleeps, the stars shine,
and “all about the courtly stable, /
Bright- harness’d Angels sit in order
serviceable.” In Paradise Lost, the ma-
ture poet will champion such obedient
passivity as a new and better type of
heroism; here, Moshenska suggests, we
see the idea in tentative draft.
The capacity to make “poetry out
of... hesitation” is one Milton honed,
achieving strange and haunting re-
sults—most notably in November 1637,
when he was asked to contribute to a
memorial volume for Edward King,
a fellow of Christ’s College who had
drowned off the coast of Wales that Au-
gust. King was twenty- five at his death,
Milton about to turn twenty- nine, and
in the poem he wrote for King, “Lyci-
das,” a pastoral elegy of 193 irregularly
rhymed, metrically uneven lines, time
is everywhere out of joint.
It’s out of joint in the opening stanza,
where the poet- narrator seems to ar-
rive at once belatedly and prematurely,
jaded and uncouth, to the conventional
pastoral scene:Yet once more, O ye laurels, and
once more,
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never
sere,
I come to pluck your berries
harsh and crude,
And with forc’d fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the
mellowing year.Whatever the right season for
mourning and myrtle berries might be,
this isn’t it—but neither, in the view
of many baffled readers, is it the right
moment for the poet to fret over the
disappointments of his own stalled ca-
reer (“Alas, what boots it with unces-
sant care/To tend the homely, slighted
shepherd’s trade/And strictly meditate
the thankless muse?”) or to summon
Phoebus Apollo to offer a rousing
pep talk and ringing endorsement in
response. Still less is it a moment for
waxing indignant over the abuses of
the English clergy, as Milton does in an
apocalyptic nineteen- line diatribe that
interrupts the poem two thirds of the
way through, delivered in the thunder-
ing voice of Saint Peter, no less.
With its cacophony of important
and self- important ranters, “Lycidas”
hardly has room to remember King,
which made it, in Samuel Johnson’s
view, a bad poem in every sense of the
term: “Where there is leisure for fiction
there is little grief. In this poem there
is no nature, for there is no truth; there
is no art, for there is nothing new.” Mo-shenska disagrees: what’s new here is
the daring with which Milton declines
to reconcile the time scales of his own
existence, the confidence in an eter-
nal judgment and reward set alongside
the uncertainties of recognition in the
present, the ancient and dignified quest
for poetic fame jostling with the im-
pulse to hurl himself into more timely
conflicts. What we hear in “Lycidas”
are “the voices that crowded in upon
him” whenever he sat down to write.In 1638 “Lycidas” appeared in print,
at the back of the memorial volume
for Edward King, signed “J. M.”—the
first of Milton’s poems to be published
under his own name. (His youthful
elegy for Shakespeare had been anon-
ymously included in the 1632 Second
Folio, and the “Masque at Ludlow
Castle” anonymously printed in 1637.)
That same year Milton left his father’s
home and, for the first time, England,
embarking on a fifteen- month tour of
continental Europe. Equipped with an
i nt ro duc tor y let t er f rom t he for mer d ip -
lomat Sir Henry Wotton, he made his
way from Paris to Rome, Naples, Flor-
ence, and finally to Geneva. He met
ambassadors, scholars, poets, artists,
singers, cardinals, and even the famed
Galileo, then under house arrest by the
Inquisition in the Florentine country-
side—punished, as Milton later wrote,
“for thinking in Astronomy otherwise
than the Franciscan and Dominican li-
censers thought.”
McDowell and Moshenska both see
this trip as transformative: as in a Henry
James novel, going to Europe was the
beginning of the end of Milton’s age of
innocence. Moshenska focuses on the
seductive appeal of Italian music and
culture, all of it drenched in the Cathol-
icism Milton had been raised to loathe
and mistrust. McDowell suspects that
the real shock to Milton’s system came
when he returned to England, in the
late summer of 1639, to find the Bish-
ops’ Wars in full swing, as Laud and his
followers sought to impose greater con-
formity on the reform- minded church
in Scotland, and an Inquisition- like
apparatus of clerical surveillance and
state censorship took shape frighten-
ingly close to home. It was one thing
to lament “the servile condition into
which learning amongst [the Italians]
was brought” by the tyranny of the
Catholic clergy; it was quite another to
contemplate the dampening effects of
an authoritarian church on his own as
yet unwritten poetic masterpieces.
Likely prompted by Thomas Young,
Milton threw his lot in with the so-
called Presbyterians, generating a
stream of polemical attacks on the
Laudian establishment and gathering
quick notice for the ferocity of his wit.
But he continued to be driven by his
own peculiar and private faith in him-
self: as evidence, McDowell points to
the strikingly odd treatise titled The
Reason of Church- Government Urged
Against Prelaty (1642). The first half
of The Reason of Church- Government
does what the title suggests, mounting
a densely cited scriptural case against
the Anglican bishopric as a grotesque
aggrandizement of the priestly func-
tions sanctioned in the Old and New
Testaments. But at the midpoint of his
argument, Milton suddenly swerves
from church politics to autobiography,
cataloging his early poetic achieve-
ments, boasting of the warm praise hisverses elicited at the Italian academies,
and assuring his reader—who certainly
had not asked—of his unshaken deter-
mination to make good on his youthful
promise by writing a genuine English
epic,go[ing] on trust with him toward
the payment of what I am now in-
debted, as being a work not to be
raised from the heat of youth, or
the vapors of wine... but by devout
prayer to that eternal spirit who
can enrich with all utterance and
knowledge, and sends out his ser-
aphim with the hallowed fire of his
altar, to touch and purify the lips
of whom he pleases.This, then, is the ground on which Mil-
ton stakes his “right to meddle in...
matters” of church and state:An inward prompting which now
grew daily upon me, that by labor
and intent study... joined with
the strong propensity of nature,
I might perhaps leave something
so written to aftertimes, as they
should not willingly let it die.We need not wonder why Milton
becomes a radical, McDowell and Mo-
shenska suggest, for Milton himself
tells us why: the poet made the polem-
icist and the writer the revolutionary.
It’s an explanation that sweeps aside
debates about the depth and character
of Milton’s commitments to republican-
ism or liturgical reform or the doctrine
of free will, insisting instead on the un-
matched seriousness of his commitment
to poetry, and to himself. In a pleasing
irony, both McDowell and Moshenska
root Milton’s iconoclasm in the most
mainstream and orthodox of Renais-
sance faiths, the humanist faith in the
power of language to transport and
transform and make the world anew.There is a less dignified story one
might tell about Milton’s radicaliza-
tion in the early 1640s: the story of
his seemingly impulsive, evidently
disastrous marriage to Mary Powell.
Roughly half the thirty- three- year- old
Milton’s age when he met and married
her, Mary was the daughter of Richard
Powell, an Oxfordshire landowner who
had borrowed money from the poet’s
father. In the first half of 1642, Milton
traveled to Oxfordshire to collect the
debt and returned to London a married
man. Contracted on the brink of civil
war—in January 1642 Charles I sent
armed guards to the House of Com-
mons to arrest five members of Parlia-
ment on charges of treason ; rebu f fed by
the Speaker of the House, he left Lon-
don and headed north, preparing for an
invasion—the new marriage resulted
almost immediately in its own domes-
tic breach: within weeks of arriving in
Milton’s home, an unhappy Mary went
back to Oxfordshire.
She would remain there for three
years. In the course of those years, her
estranged husband became the leading
exponent of what he termed “the doc-
trine and discipline of divorce.” The
so- called Divorce Tracts—there were
four in all—made Milton notorious,
even among Presbyterians, and he re-
acted by withdrawing his support for
their cause, embracing a more expan-
sive and thoroughgoing libertarianism,
opposed to any religious or govern-mental hierarchy aiming “to force our
consciences that Christ set free.”
Humiliating though the motives of
this transformation may have been—
and it’s probably a mistake to read
too much into the marital failure—it
spurred Milton to produce a work for
which he would still have a prominent
place in the English literary canon
even if Paradise Lost had never been
written. Areopagitica, a 1644 pamphlet
addressed to Parliament in protest of a
new law increasing governmental reg-
ulation of the book trade, features, as
Moshenska writes, “the most electri-
fying and famous prose that he ever
produced.” In the pamphlet, Milton
argues fiercely against censorship as
tantamount to murder:As good almost kill a man as kill a
good book; who kills a man kills a
reasonable creature, God’s image;
but he who destroys a good book,
kills reason itself.... A good book
is the precious life- blood of a mas-
ter spirit, embalmed and treasured
up on purpose to a life beyond life.He was, in a sense, fighting for his own
life: the life he had led so far, almost
entirely in the company of books and
their dead authors and the “life beyond
life” he still hoped to achieve. In Are-
opagitica, he began to achieve it.
Notably, Areopagitica also contains
a passage in which Milton seems to
sketch the outlines of the story of the
Fall, meditating for the first time in
public on its importance to his own
moral, political, and philosophical val-
ues. Making his case for the evils of
censorship even when applied to indu-
bitably bad books, he reasons:It was from out the rind of one
apple tasted that the knowledge of
good and evil as two twins cleaving
together leapt forth into the World.
And perhaps this is that doom
which Adam fell into of knowing
good and evil, that is to say, of
knowing good by evil. As therefore
the state of man now is, what wis-
dom can there be to choose, what
continence to forbear without the
knowledge of evil?... I cannot
praise a fugitive and cloistered
virtue, unexercised & unbreathed,
that never sallies out and sees her
adversary, but slinks out of the
race, where that immortal garland
is to be run for, not without dust
and heat. Assuredly we bring not
innocence into the world, we bring
impurity much rather: that which
purifies us is trial, and trial is by
what is contrary. That virtue there-
fore which is but a youngling in the
contemplation of evil, and knows
not the utmost that vice promises
to her followers, and rejects it, is
but a blank virtue, not a pure.But when he came at last to write his
own version of this story, Milton al-
lowed himself—and us—to linger in
an imaginary world where none of this
was yet the case: where the wisdom to
choose and the freedom to experiment
were exercised on an almost infinite
array of blameless alternatives, limited
by a single prohibition. To know good
by knowing good is the privilege of the
unfallen, and in the middle books of
Paradise Lost, we see just how surpris-
ing, variable, and rich with potential
such an existence might have been. QNicholson 38 40 .indd 40 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 31 PM