reading Lycidas

Thinking about Lycidas over the past few days, rereading the poem again & again. Thinking about Emerson in 1833, on his first transatlantic crossing, the ship caught in a gale & no-one on board knowing whether they were going to be alive or dead an hour hence, fishing the poem out of his memory: "I remembered up nearly the whole of Lycidas, clause by clause, here a verse & there a word, as Isis in the fable the broken body of Osiris."

Edward King, "a learned friend, unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637." "Who would not sing for Lycidas?" And who would sing for Milton, were he to drop dead at 28, author of a handful of minor poems? "So may some gentle muse / With lucky words favor my destined urn..." And who would sing for the 30-year-old Emerson, all his works yet to be written?

Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies, seizes upon Lycidas – "a book perfectly known to you all" – & gives it an early & still unsurpassed "close reading":

Now go on: –

'Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast.
Blind mouths –'

I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly.

Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, int he two great offices of the Church – those of bishop and pastor.

A 'Bishop' means 'a person who sees.'

A 'Pastor' means 'a person who feeds.'

The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind.

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed, – to be a Mouth.

In both instances, an immediate laying hands on a text familiar from childhood. (A nineteenth-century phenomenon, this easy assuming of familiarity with Milton's minor poems?) I didn't read Lycidas, I suspect, until I was in my mid-twenties. My students are encountering it, for the most part, for the first time – unless they've read it in another college course. What's lost in the university teaching of canonical poems when students (& for that matter their instructors) don't have that from-childhood familarity with the text? (More importantly, since there's no turning back the cultural clock, what's gained?)

Samuel Johnson hated Lycidas. One of the best "bad review" lines ever: "Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known its author."

For Johnson, the poem suffered in the first place from being a pastoral, "easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting." (Keeping in mind that "vulgar" and "disgusting" meant something rather different in 1779 than they do now.) Its pastoral frame, its allegory, its "inherent improbability" – its lack of shall we say realism – mean that the poem "will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honour." And Lycidas's "grosser fault" lies precisely in Milton's Renaissance humanism: its mingling of the "awful and sacred truths" of Christian religion with the "trifling fictions" of the classical pastoral. If Lycidas is praised, Johnson concludes, it is because the "blaze" of "reputation justly acquired" "drives the eye away from nice examination."

We could say, I think, that Lycidas just isn't the sort of poem Johnson likes; (and – moreover?) that it violates his criteria of aesthetic valuation, criteria which include a certain "smoothness" of texture, a certain realism, and above all an ironclad decorum: one simply oughtn't higglety-pigglety mix together classical nymphs & singing shepherds with Christian pastors, regardless of the etymology of "pastor" itself.

(Discuss, perhaps, in relation to Michael Thurston's "review" of Black Life?)

books, bonfires, lawyers

The Milton course this semester will be reading what I guess is a substantial chunk of his controversial prose – more than they’d like to, I imagine. “Controversial,” by the way, means “involved in controversies that aren’t particularly relevant to most of my students’ lives” – like who cares about the structure of church government anymore? or who among my 20- to 25-year-olds believes that divorce should only be allowed in cases of adultery, whatever Jesus said about it?

But there’s one hoary old text that never fails the “contemporary relevance” test: Areopagitica, the “freedom of the press” pamphlet Milton published in 1644, which was much on the mind of the Framers when they put that 1st Amendment into the Constitution, & which gets cited at every turn whenever someone wants to defend someone’s right to publish something.

As never fails to get pointed out, Areopagitica isn’t a clarion call against censorship in general (Milton does believe works of “tolerated popery and open superstition” should not be allowed): it’s a call specifically against pre-publication censorship, books being entirely blocked from publication. Books, Milton argues, ought to be published with the names of their authors & publishers attached, and only then assessed. If an anonymously issued book is found to be “mischievous and libelous,” then it should be burned by the hangman; one assumes that name-bearing books would be liable to the same treatment, & their authors and publishers liable for whatever bads they promulgate. This isn’t so very different from contemporary American law: though attempts to criminalize “seditious” writing tend to peter out, libel remains a powerful legal stick wielded by corporations and individuals against writers and publishers.

Three things of course made me think forward on my syllabus towards Areogpagitica, & the whole discourse of the ills that books might do: First, someone’s reminiscence of this Houston loony, who back in 2006 wanted to remove Fahrenheit 451 from the school’s curriculum because of its “cussing” (his daughter’s description) and “using God’s name in vain,” and because of its descriptions of Bible burning. All taking place, beautifully, during Banned Books Week. (The irony of course is overwhelming.) Which of course led me to think about this whole business in Gainesville with the publicity-seeking “pastor” who’s hit upon Koran-burning as his last-ditch fundraiser for his on-life-support Pentecostal congregation. (No links there – you’ve already heard more than enough about this guy.)

And finally, Kent Johnson – the premier gadfly of American poetry. His latest work, A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “By” Frank O’Hara, in press at the moment, is something of a thought experiment: what if “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” a poem found among O’Hara’s posthumous papers by his friend Kenneth Koch, were not by O’Hara at all, but by Koch? Edmond Caldwell lays out the matter well in this post, as well as revealing the next, eye-popping development: a stern letter to Johnson’s publisher from the Kenneth Koch literary estate, strongly threatening legal action should A Question Mark be actually published.

Richard Allen addresses the legalities of the matter here, along with raising some questions about the letter’s authenticity, given Kent’s history of involvement with things – the Araki Yasusada business – that have gotten labelled “hoaxes” in some quarters. I don’t think KJ’s bluffing here; and I’d like to register outrage at the Koch people’s attempt to roll back the clock to the time before we all read Areopagitica. Hey, whatever you think of Yasusada or Kent Johnson in general, this is the moment to drop $20 for A Question Mark, if only to let Bertelsmann Inc. know that some American writing & thought is still taking place outside their umbrella of Mordor.

as ever

Milton's 7th sonnet, "How soon hath Time," bemoaning the passing of his 23rd year & the fact that he has as yet little in the way of accomplishment to show, and even lacks "inward ripeness," ends with this enigmatic sentence:

All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task Masters eye.

(I quote Roy Flannagan's original-spelling version). Already, in the sonnet's sestet, Milton has shifted from bewailing to acceptance; whatever his pace of maturation/production, it will be "in strictest measure eev'n / To that same lot, however mean, or high, / Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav'n."

The gist of the final lines is clear, restating the sentiments of the four lines before. But how precisely do we parse them? The annotators take a range of stabs at it:

Merritt Hughes cites Lewis Campbell, Pindar, Kester Svendsen, and Donald Dorian, and ends with Dorian's paraphrase:

All time is, if I have grace to use it so, as eternity in God's sight.

John Shawcross offers his own paraphase:

All things are, as they have always been, foreseen by God, my great task-master, just as long as I have the grace to use my inward ripeness as He wishes.

Flannagan quotes Svendsen:

All that matters is whether I have grace to use my ripeness in accordance with the will of God as one ever in His sight.

And Kerrigan/Rumrich/Fallon (this semester's set text) offer this:

All that I do in time is as though done in eternity, provided that I have the grace to act in accord with God's will.

Flannagan/Svendsen makes the most prose "sense" of the passage, tho he's clearly going well beyond the letter of the text ("All that matters"?). Kerrigan et al. would seem to be mildly expanding Hughes/Dorian. Shawcross is as usual pertinent (tho one has to ask whether the speaker's failure to "use his inward grace" would somehow invalidate God's foreknowledge, as Shawcross's syntax implies).

What do these glosses add up to, with all their minor variances & restatements of earlier authorities? They add up to one of those passages, so common in Milton, in which the overall import is fairly clear, but the specific semantic relations among the words are far less so.
***
LZ, 1963, in I's (pronounced eyes) will refunction Milton into a link between the transcendent, unreachable "blue sky" of Mallarmé and the debased orthography of contemporary advertisement:

Azure
as ever
adz aver

punctuation, with reference to Milton & Lisa Robertson

Yes, the Modern Library Milton I'm teaching from this Fall has quotation marks; that is, when characters in Paradise Lost talk, their speeches are indicated with good old-fashioned (American style) quotation marks. E.g., Satan at IV.31-34:

Then much revolving, thus in sighs began.
"O thou that with surpassing glory crowned,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God
Of this new world...

The original 1674 text of course has no such marks, but looks a lot more like what Roy Flannagan gives us in the Riverside Milton:

Then much revolving, thus in sighs began.
O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd,
Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World...

All decisions on punctuating Milton, and for that matter on spelling, are pretty much up to the editor, since it's generally assumed that JM, who dictated his poem when he was blind, left his amanuenses responsible for those "accidentals." Flannagan sticks pretty closely to the early printed editions for punctuation, as do most editors (one exception is Gordon Teskey's excellent Norton Critical edition, which opts to punctuate as lightly as possible). Flannagan is notable for presenting something close to an "original-spelling" edition, while most editors have tended to modernize the spellings of the poem (except for such items as "thir" for "their," which might reflect Milton's pronunciation).

But none of the editions I have lying around at the moment – Flannagan, Hughes, Teskey, Shawcross – I can't be bothered at the moment to pull down Fowler – insert quotation marks, as Kerrigan et al. do in the Modern Library edition. It's part of the overall modernizing push of the ML edition, an attempt (I take it) to make the book as user-friendly as possible for students. They've ironed out most of the early editions' italics, done away with the Germanic capitalizations (see the Flannagan quotation), and tried to make the punctuation as helpful as possible. I have no problem with any of this: if I want to see what Milton's amanuenses & printers made of his script, I can easily open up Flannagan or check out the early editions on EEBO; my students are going to have trouble enough with Milton's syntax and referentiality without having to also struggle with early modern orthography. (One of J.'s students once wrote in an essay that Shakespeare was difficult because he wrote in "old broken English.")

But what about those quotation marks? They're definitely a modern intrusion. Quotation marks, as I understand it, didn't become standard equipment for the English writer until sometime in the 18th century. Milton himself never used them, even when he had the use of his eyes to write and read proof. What you get over & over again in Paradise Lost (& this reflects the fact that he had early on conceived of the project in dramatic terms) is large block speeches, introduced by speech tags ("To whom thus Adam."), and marked by slight indentation of the first line. (Milton doesn't do short speeches in PL – none of that Senecan backing-&-forthing – which is part of what makes Eve's humble one-liner at 10.162 so wonderful: "The Serpent me beguiled and I did eat.")

But I've decided I don't mind the quotation marks in the Modern Library edition. Even if they're a modern intrusion, they don't change the overall texture of the text, and they'll probably be a bit of an aid to my students (and for that matter to me) in keeping straight when someone's talking. Of course, if this had been an 18th- or 19th-century edition, those quotation marks on lines of poetry would look rather different:

Then much revolving, thus in sighs began.
'O thou that with surpassing glory crowned,
'Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God
'Of this new world...

Orthographical standards in the 18th and 19th centuries specified that each line of direct speech in verse should be preceded with its own quotation mark. That's the convention at work in The Cantos, as for instance in Canto V:

"Yet feared this might not end him," or lest Alessandro
Know not by whom death came, O se credesse
"If when the foot slipped, when death came upon him,
"Lest cousin Duke Alessandro think he had fallen alone,
"No friend to aid him in falling."

(Is Pound being intentionally archaic here? I don't think so – the replacement of the every-line quotation marks with quotation marks only at the beginning & end of a quoted passage in the later Cantos, my sense is, reflects a shift in general printing standards rather than a shift in Pound's orthographical aesthetic.)

It's pretty obvious that those every-line quotation marks wouldn't work for Milton, would end up being unbelievably fussy & intrusive decorating his 40- or 50-line speeches. So the opening & closing quotes – double in the American convention & all – make sense to me.
***
Of course, trust Lisa Robertson to do something new & eye-opening with orthography. Among a number of arresting moments in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House, 2009) is this, in "About 1836," in which the speaker asks "the dog of Latinity" to tell her about boredom.

The dog replied:

'At the edges of the villages of Europe
'there is boredom.
'The villages of Europe
'don't want your thinking.
'They want
'not a world.
'In these villages
'one rereads the soiled timetables
'of minor trains
'and finds therein
'Grace. This is called
'an environment. Now
'you weep its surplus.
'Nowhere is like that.

And the dog said

'I am going to call it hegemony when [....]

Did you catch that? First of all, note the effect of this archaic orthographical device, when applied to heavily enjambed, short-lined free verse – I can only call it "weird, in a cool way." (Note how I'm slipping into my highly-theoretical professorial voice.) But truly strange is its fracturing – the fact that there is no closing quotation mark after "that." The quotation ends without a mark of ending. It's not a typo; she does it again, several times, over the course of the poem.

The effect is odd, at least for this reader. Just as I was beginning to "naturalize" the every-line quotes, suddenly I was jerked into awareness of them by Robertson's very violation of their conventions. And I remained hyper-aware of the quotation marks for the whole of the poem. They became a repeatedly meaningful punctuation, rather than a default indicator of speech.

I want to relate this to the pervasive quotation marks in Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, but it's something I want to think about more.

collected works

The semester is winding down, I suppose; there're only a couple more weeks of classes, for the nonce I'm not facing anything that I have to grade, & I'm thinking forward to the Fall. Book orders, that is. I'm teaching a graduate poetry workshop, which is always fun, always an adventure. Between now & the end of July, I guess, I'll settle on a half dozen or 8 recent books of poetry to discuss. Suggestions for assigned texts would be welcome. (If you want me to consider your book, of course, I need to have read a copy – hint, hint.)

The undergraduate Milton class is a bit more of a challenge. I love teaching Milton, have done it maybe four times before. The first couple of times I assigned the more or less recent Riverside Milton, edited by Roy Flannagan; it's got all of the texts I'd want to teach (and many more), presents them in original spelling, and has fairly useful introductions to each selection. But the book, to be frank, isn't a patch on the Riverside Shakespeare and the Riverside Chaucer, two really landmark, rock-solid edition: where they have neatly segregated textual notes and super-clean glosses and explanatory notes, Flannagan bungs all of his annotations – textual, word-defining, interpretive, explanatory, speculative, and (occasionally) just plain wrong – into these huge blocks at the foot of the page. Hey, I live for this scholarly stuff, & even I'm put off by the way the book's presented. (I find I've blogged this same kvetch almost 4 years ago; sigh.)

So a couple of Milton courses back, I switched to Merritt Y. Hughes's John Milton: Complete Poetry and Major Prose, an edition that first came out in 1957, & that's now in print from Hackett. It doesn't have original spelling – which in the case of Paradise Lost may not really be an issue, given that Milton was blind at the time & didn't really have control over the orthography – but its annotations are rather lighter than Flannagan's (maybe too light), and its introductions are much sketchier.

What I'd really like to use is David Kastan's super-fine recent edition of Paradise Lost, plus a volume of the prose, plus a volume of the short poems. But the only semi-affordable prose I can find is Patrides's U Missouri edition of the Selected Prose, which seems to be running about $25 these days (for a wee paperback); and any available decent volume of the short poems is simply outrageously expensive. (You see, I'm thinking of my students.) I suspect I'll hie me to Barnes & Noble sometime in the next few days to check out the recent Modern Library Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, which looks pretty darned decent from what I can see of it in the Amazon preview.
***
Looking back over Milton again has made me think of that odd notion of "covering" or "mastering" an author. I've read all of JM's poetry, much of it multiple times, and I've probably been thru between 50% & 75% of his prose. There aren't a lot of writers I can honestly say I know the whole of. (Of course, I've read everything LZ ever wrote, but he's an exception.) I know all of WC Williams's poetry, but his fiction, plays, and much of his prose are terra incognita. I've read all of Shakespeare's plays and most of his other poetry, but there are a few items of the canon that I've managed to avoid. Faulkner, I know maybe 6 or 7 novels. Woolf, all the novels except 3, but very little of the stories or essays. There are large bodies of writing out there I'd love to plunge into, but am daunted by the sheer breadth and variety of achievement: Wyndham Lewis (I've read Apes of God and Tarr, but nothing else); George Eliot (Daniel Deronda and – too long ago – Middlemarch).

I can understand why some people become Joyceans and more or less get stuck there. It's a large and very rich universe, the big 4 (Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, & the Wake) & their minor outriders, but it's also a wholly manageable bigness. I could happily reread Ulysses every couple months till I die, if I had the time. Or Melville, for that matter, though there's a bit more variety there – a Dickens-sized corpus, rereadable on a yearly basis, if that's your inclination.

Which is why I'm fascinated and daunted at the same time by the big maroon monster to the left of my desk: the Ruskin Library Edition, all 39 volumes of hugeness. They probably average out to 500 pages or so apiece, and even after you shave off the 2 volumes of bibliography and index, that still leaves you with something like 18,000 pages of Ruskin to tackle. Quentin Bell, in the preface to his excellent little book on Ruskin, recalls spending an entire year reading thru the Library Edition – but he was careful to add, he wasn't reading anything else, either.

I've probably read more Ruskin than most scholars of 20th- & 21st-century poetry (maybe more than some Victorianists): several volumes of Modern Painters, all of Fors Clavigera, one of Stones of Venice, 7 Lamps of Architecture, Praeterita, all of the social & political volumes, and between a half-dozen and a dozen of thises & thats. Most of these have been read in other editions than the Library Edition, but I reckon I've covered the material in maybe 12 or 13 of the LE volumes. Which leaves a daunting amount of Ruskin still to be read. I'm not surprised that there are a few Ruskinians out there who seem to do nothing else – David Hewison, for instance, who at last count has published 6 or 7 books on Ruskin. And I'm not surprised that there aren't more, for the sheer bulk of the guy's output feels like a kind of vortex into which one can get sucked & never write about anything else again.

For heaven's sake, I've spent too many years being introduced as "the LZ guy" (why not, "that guy who writes for Parnassus," or "minor poet, not conspicuously dishonest"?); perhaps the only move I could make into deeper obscurity would be to become "the Ruskin scholar MS."

Tho, to tell the truth, "the Wyndham Lewis scholar MS" sounds even obscurer.

Indefatigable Milton

With my normal skewed sense of immediate priorities, I'm reading around towards the Milton course I'll be teaching this coming Fall (get it – "fall"?). Paradise Lost moves along nicely at a book a sitting, especially in David Kastan's better-than-excellent Hackett edition (a revision of the Merritt Hughes standby). J. came back from the Shakespeare Association with a stack of book table display copies for me, including the luscious recent biography, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought by Gordon Campbell and Thomas M. Corns. I've only read two lives of JM: Peter Levi's Eden Renewed (well-written but bad) and Barbara Lewalski's enormous biography-of-record.

But the real prize is Annabel Patterson's latest book, Milton's Words (OUP, 2009), a little examination of how Milton uses various "keywords" over his career. I'm only far enough in to be delighted with Patterson's deft prose and amazing gift for analytic summary, but she gives a lovely taste of what's to come in the introduction, where she looks at the fortunes of the rather rare word "indefatigable" (one of those polysyllabic Latin borrowings – Seneca, De Ira – that give my students headaches). Milton uses it only twice, once in Areopagitica (referring to Parliament's "indefatigable Vertue") and once in Paradise Lost.

But before Milton's epic, it was used twice by Milton's friend Andrew Marvell, both times in connection with Oliver Cromwell. In the "Horatian Ode," he addresses the Lord Protector thus:

But thou the Wars and Fortunes Son
March indefatigably on.

(Whoosh – three whole feet of the tetrameter taken up with a single latinate adverb – don't try this at home, kids!) And in "The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.," Marvell writes of how "indefatigable Cromwell hyes / And cuts his way still nearer to the Skyes."

For his part, Milton takes the word and gives it – yes – to Satan, as the fallen angel describes to his comrades the dangers of his prospective venture to the newly-created Eden:

Who shall tempt with wandring feet
The dark unbottom'd infinite Abyss
and through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt. (2.404-9)

Of this, Patterson writes:

You can see that Milton has learned from Marvell the art of fitting that "uncouth" word smoothly into verse. You can see that here the first two un-words are not positives disguised as negatives but actual negatives, scary with the idea of free fall and unknown territory. You might infer, therefore, and especially because it is Satan speaking, speaking speciously, that 'indefatigable' is here also not a positive disguised by syntax as a negative, but a negative doubly darkened by its context. So what does it say to Marvell's second Cromwellian 'indefatigable', which also imagines a flying superhuman figure? I cannot believe that these astonishing words, used only twice by Milton, are not cross-references to each other and Marvell's, implying that Satan is the dark shadow of Marvell's heroic Cromwell. We know that by 1667, when he published Paradise Lost, Milton no longer shared his friend's admiration for Cromwell; he had also, by the way, demolished his own image of a heroic Long Parliament. (7-8)

I don't know whether Patterson will keep up this kind of wonderful intellectual nimbleness over all 200 pages of this small book, but I anticipate a kind of heaven of close reading, concordance work, and historical contextualization.