In Our Time - Milton

Episode Date: March 7, 2002

Melvyn Bragg examines the literary and political career of the poet John Milton. If it wasn't for the poet Andrew Marvell we wouldn't have his later works; Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Milton spent the English Civil Wars as a prominent politician and right hand man to Oliver Cromwell. When the Monarchy was restored in 1660 it was only Marvell's intervention that saved Milton from execution. By then, Marvell argued, Milton was old and blind and posed no threat to Charles II. But as a young man Milton had been an activist and pamphleteer extraordinaire. Allegedly inspired by a meeting with Galileo he wrote in passionate defence of Liberty. He detested the Church's insistence on empty ritual. And most dramatically for his time he demanded that the state serve its people rather than the people serve the state. How then should we remember Milton - as poet or politician - as an idealist or an apologist for a revolutionary yet intolerant regime? And was he a man at one with the people or an elitist who preached to the masses but lived his own life only in the most rarefied of circles? With John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary College, University of London and Honorary Fellow of King's College Cambridge; Blair Worden, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Sussex.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, if it wasn't for the poet Andrew Marvel, it's unlikely that we would have the later works of John Milton, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonisties.

Milton spent the English Civil Wars as a prominent political pamphleteer and apologist for Oliver Cron. When the moniker was restored in 1660, he was put in prison, and it was only Marvel's intervention that saved Milton from execution. By then Marvel argued, Milton was old and blind and posed no threat to Charles II, and really he was a classicist and a poet. But as a younger man, Milton had been an activist and propagandist for a radical and intolerant regime. He wrote in passionate defense of liberty, he detested bishops.

Most dramatically for his time, he demanded that the state serve its people rather than the people serve the state. Yet he was an uncompromising elitist who despised the herd confused. With me to discuss the political life of John Milton, a John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, and co-editor of Longman's edition of Milton's complete poems. Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, and Honor a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and Blair Worden, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Sussex, and author of Roundhead Reputation, the English civil wars and the passions of posterity.

John Carey, can we just set Milton in his early context? Born in 16 or eight, Shakespeare is still alive. The Great Bible is about to come out. The Amad is a very hot memory. He seems to have had an early sense of vocation. Yes, he was a very precocious boy. He says that since he was 12, he all sat up to his books until midnight. He was pushed very hard by a very ambitious father.

had tutors at home as well as going to school at St Paul's. His father, yes, I think his father had high aims for him. He wrote a poem to his father when he left Cambridge, thanking his father for not making him go into any profession, but allowing him to have leisure to become a great poet. And he sketches out his plans for poetic immortality. So yes, he knew. Yes, he knew, it seems, from the age of 21 or earlier, that he was going to be a great poet.

He was determined. And he saw it as a divinely granted gift, as I understand it, didn't he? Oh, yes. So that's the only way it could happen for him. I mean, basic to Milton. His religious faith was very odd. I mean, we'll talk about this later, I'm sure. He didn't believe in God in the conventional 17th century way, if there was a conventional 17th century way.

He was very argumental even by mid-semanentary standards. But he was, yeah, he profoundly believed in God. And to my mind, Milton is often misunderstood because I think we look back at him as a figure of sort of supreme self-confidence, bigotry and self-confidence. I think that's quite long. He lacked confidence in himself, and he needed to believe in divine inspiration.

So, yes, I think that the divine mission, divine aid was essential to him. This is Jardian, in the story of Milton has received, but you're going to explode it, I'm quite sure. One of the key points and the catalytic points in his life is he goes to Italy, well, to look at the antiquities and the scholar would go to Italy for the reason. And, and Galileo under threat for his ideas and the poor. part of the Catholic Church, which Milton, as many, many Englishmen, had reason to fear because they were allied with, in hot memories, I said, out of the Armada and so on. And Galileo, the plight of Galileo, the situation, Gallagher, radically changed him. Now, is there any truth in that? Well, we do have nicely the textual evidence that Milton did meet Galileo.

I mean, he actually mentions it at least four times. He mentions it in the Ariopogittica, in 1644 in the pamphlets against censorship, where indeed he mentions, the encounter in Italy with real repression of ideas. And there, yes indeed, the seeer in Fiesli is there, the figure who is imprisoned for his beliefs and Milton uses him talismanically for why there has to be liberty of thought in England. However, in Paradise Lost, he uses Galileo differently. He uses him as the visionary, as the great. exponent of continental ideas. So you have to see the trip to Italy, I think, in two ways.

You see it both as his encounter with the Catholic Church and the way in which, quite frankly, that looked like the way the English church might go at that moment. On the other hand, it's the great explosion of humanistic ideas, of art, of an encounter with a richness of access to antiquity, classical ruins lying around. which was something for Milton that was completely new. And following on from John's beautiful characterization of how Milton was at Cambridge, imagine an undergraduate of rather austere personal beliefs

with a passion for the classics. And he goes off to Italy, and there it is richly all around him. And somehow it's richly all around him in a way that is not out of bounds. People are living it who have beliefs that are not repressive. are not Catholic.

I think there's a real doubleness about that trip to Italy, which we could track all the way through Milton's subsequent life, the richness of the classical experience against the repression of the Catholic Church. No, Warden, we're talking about Milton as a not very famous in a general sense poet at this stage at the end of the 30s early 40s. John Kerry has pointed that out in several things. He's written, and a Latinist. But nevertheless, as we've heard again from John at the beginning in the programme,

a man with a divinely high calling. Yet in the early 1640s he renounced his poetry, which must have been a great event in his intellectual life, if it was divinely granted and is a man of deep seriousness, and he moves and begins publishing anti-episcop of pamphlets. Now can you just tell us something about why the torrent of these pamphlets came at this time and what in general, what quarry in general, the quarries they were pursuing?

Well, it's a momentous step for him. the change. He comes back from Italy that very exciting time that neither Jardine described with I think a heightened sense of and confidence in his own powers as a poet. He's full of ideas for the epic poem that he wants, the national epic poem that he wants to write. And he has a great sense which so many poets of his time had of the power and the duty of poetry to educate and reform the nation and its leaders to as he says to breathe and cherish in a great people or nation, the seeds of civility and public virtue. But it can't do it overnight.

There are urgent practical issues that have to be addressed in 1641. It's a time of tremendous turbulence of apocalyptic excitement and a different kind of instrument is needed. The instrument of political prose written as he says of the left hand. And for the next, well, nearly 20 years, from his early 30s to his early 50s he writes, he doesn't, if he renounces poetry, he still doesn't. right perjury, but not very much of it, but the great poetic ambitions are suspended. And he addresses the great issues, first of all the bishops in 1641 to two, later the marriage

laws, then liberty of the press, and then later on the removal of political tyranny. And it's inflammatory, often abusive, but often very powerful prose. Is there a sense at this stage that by criticizing the church, this is stalking the political establishment or is the church the political establishment. Can we just disentangle for me and for everybody else listening? What criticizing the church really meant? If you look at the pamphlets, the early pamphlets against the bishops, what he's very careful not to do? I mean, Blair will correct me if I'm wrong, but I read it, he's very careful not to criticize the king. Indeed, one of his reasons, one of the reasons he brings forward for attacking the

bishops is that he says, Episcopal power, eats away at, erode kingly power, erode kingly And if you look at the early work, there's nothing to make you suppose this is a man who will defend the execution of a king. I think in a sense one of the things that's coming out very clearly here is that Milton finds himself at a crisis, which is really a constitutional crisis that has been brewing probably since the Reformation in England, which is what you do when the church is at odds with everything you believe in, and you wish from a position of absolute rationality like Milton to argue for liberty, for liberty of thought, for liberty of ideas, what you do, given that the church and state are now shackled together in the person of the king,

when you say are the politics and the religion allied, necessarily they are so in England in this period, as in any other period, indeed. Necessarily they are. But Milton, I think, doesn't quite see it coming, as John has just said, that by that fierce defence of liberty, he is going to find himself ultimately, almost necessarily in a position of defending regicide. Yes. Can I ask you, how effective were his pamphlets? Do we have any way of judging? And to whom were they addressed? Well, how effective was. I don't think they were very effective. They were not very widely read. I mean, the pamphets

which make a great splash are his pamphlets against the divorce laws. which are much more, I think, attacked than red, if you like. And then in the 1650s, when he writes in Latin for a European audience, his defenses of the English Republic and so on, they cause a great stir. But as far as we can tell from the way that people referred to his pamphlets and so on, they really don't seem to have been very widely read. But you don't have to be widely read to be influential, so what are influential?

Well, I don't know. There's something very solitary about Milton, and one really can't tell. Even his pamphlet, the most famous thing he wrote, I suppose, in prose now, of course, is Ariopagitica, which is often taken as a pamphlet supporting freedom of the press, which it by no means does, because it excludes, of course, Catholics and other people. It's hard to nudge yourself all the time that this champion of liberty would give none at all to Roman Catholics ever in any way. But Ariopacicaa didn't cut any ice at the time. Of course it didn't.

And Milton himself became a license. Milton himself, the Cameron, when you say that, incidentally, Melvin, about how you have to reconcile yourself to this champion of liberty, excluding Catholics, yes, I mean, to put it in its historical context, again, Blair will correct me, but I mean, I think he hated Catholicism partly because he saw Catholicism at itself utterly adverse to liberty. And what do you do in a democratic regime, we're facing the same kind of thing now, I mean, after September the 11th, what do you do in a democratic regime? where you're facing a regime which will not allow any freedom. Well, you have to oppose it. In a sense, you can't allow it freedom. And it's idolatrous, too. That's the other thing. You can't have idolatry.

That's what's crushing the word of God, the religion of the Bible and the preaching, which is what Milton wants. This is one reason he said against the bishops, the ceremonialism, the ritual and so on. And in time, I think, when you ask about the relationship with religion and politics, I think that the time he comes to see

that idolatry is not just a religious thing, it's a civil political thing as well. And he sees the worship of Charles I first in the late 1640s. And he talks in 1649 after the execution of the king about the proneness of the English, not only to a civil but religious, but a civil kind of idolatry. Beneath, I think, tyranny and false religion, there are these dark roots which twine and interweave. And again, when the king, when there's a tremendous support for the king's restoration in 1660, he sees again the English people who he thought it had such a destiny,

who he thought to be chosen by God, if you like, to begin the Reformation of the World, prepared away for the Second Coming, that they remain in thrall to idolatry, idolatry in the state as well as in the church. I'm tremendously interested in Blair's characterization of the pamphlets that we read so avidly, the divorce pamphlets and the pamphlets against censorship, as being solitary, because I think you can detect two completely distinct voices in Milton's prose writing from these pamphlet years, you have the voice of him arguing his own corner about liberty of thought

and about an unhappy marriage and how you ought to be entitled to detach yourself from that. And then remembering that he becomes the Latin Secretary to the new Republic. Secretary of Foreign Tongues. Secretary of Foreign Tongues right at the beginning and is then instructed to write pamphlets and indeed writes correspondence in Latin, of which we have quite a lot left, of a kind of... civil service kind, a voice there of pragmatism, which actually I think if Milton hadn't been touched by that, we might be less interested in him later. He does actually, we have to remember, have a job, at least until he goes blind and somewhat beyond in 52 and somewhat beyond,

where he is writing for the state and writes with a voice that is about defending that state and its actions. And then this solitary voice that Blair has reminded us of the pamphlets, which are the ones we actually still read. commented, Milton had not so much the love of liberty, but the repugnance to authority. Yes, I suppose it's true. It's a very shrewd remark because liberty in its full sense. I mean, you can do what you like. Milton hated, of course, because that would include idolatry and all the other things that he found deeply antipathetic. In the response to the divorce tract that Blowers talked about, what seemed to have annoyed him most was not that he was not those who thought to defend divorce was shocking, the Orthodox response, but those

who thought it was a great idea and went on to practice promiscuity. He writes a sonnet about the popular readers of the divorce tracks, and he calls them owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs. That's his idea of the popular reader and of the sectarian, you know, who just takes it too far. So that will, you might say, be liberty and yes, he hates it. He calls it license and he distinguishes in that sonic between license and liberty. And yet he was called licentious for those pamphlets. I mean, that's what so . . . . . I mean, he may have been single-minded, but there were certain

confusions in his own position. Well, you were going to come in. Well, yes. I mean, Nelson talks a great deal about liberty, and I think it's easy to this read him and think that he means by liberty, what we mean by liberty. He means something really very different. He doesn't mean, if you like, the right to do what you like. That's a license. Liberty is really a condition of a soul. It's achieved when the soul is purged of those passions and lusts which enslave it. And you have to answer that with a philosophy and practice of self-discipline, frugality, chastity, etc. Only good men love liberty, the rest

love license. What I think does make him seem one of us is his insistence on freedom of choice, that we each have a responsibility for our own destiny in which no government or church has the right to take it away from us. We define ourselves in our lives by the choices that we've made, by the choices that God has given us and left free for us. Life is full of choices, trials, temptations, the theme of his great poems. This is why he hates the Orthodox Calvinist view of predestination, which condemns millions of souls to eternal perdition in advance.

God gives us the choice to turn towards him or against him. and we're alone in that choice and we're strong full resources of our humanity, dignity, reason, virtue. I think that's very important and I think the word I would take out of that as key in Milton for me is oddly not liberty but reason because when he later chose to write his great poem about the fall of man, he chose it because he saw that as the point in human history when reason was lost. Before the fall they were reasonable.

And if you think of his attitude to almost anything, they're very reasonable. reasonable attitude to kingship. It's ludicrous. Why should the man who happens to be born in a particular family be thought fit to rule? Milton said the man who is fittest to rule is a man who showed himself fit. You know, a man, he believed in meritocracy. That's what drew him to Cromwell, not Charles I first. You look at Paradise Lost. An amazing poem. He said he's going to justify the ways of God for men. I mean, Calvinist, with a power of fit. Just if I weren't right, has human beings got to just to justify. stuff I even question the ways of God. Milton said, they're reasonable. We are reasonable

creatures. God must be reasonable too. So it's a reasonable enterprise. So, yet reason is vital to him. Yes, and it's not just ratioteous a nation as it means for us. It's a divine life within us. God gives us our reason. Lisa Johnny, can I just turn this a little bit? We have very much the view that if you're a propagandist, you can't be an artist, and particularly not the holiest of holiest, a poet. and yet Milton was a propagandist as the Secretary of Foreign Tongues he's employed because he is such a good Latinist

and all over Europe after the execution of Charles I in all the royal families and the royal states over you everybody's very very worried is this going to spread and they attack it and he is employed and told to attack back and thus defend the killing of the King Regicide do you think this do you see this as a perversion of purpose

do you see this as a hypocrisy How did you say? Well, I mean, that's how, as it were, in our critical cells we see it. But the way that he writes about it, when he writes letters to friends in the same period, to intellectual friends, is it's a job with a purpose and the reasonableness of the enterprise, the fact that this republic is going, he really believes with absolute passion is going to yield the sort of state in which a man can have real liberty, real ability, ability to live his life freely in that sense that Blair just beautifully characterized to us.

That allows him to write in ways that turn his talent with the left hand towards justifying that. A justification may have to be in terms which are in the propaganda, go beyond what you would write, within the luxury of the freedom that you anticipate coming later. We started right at the beginning talking about his sense of chosen, his sense that he was picked to be the voice of ultimate freedom. He goes blind and that makes him believe that actually he is the seer, the man who sees insight with spiritually the Homeric figure.

So I think he wrote with his left hand. He wrote pamphlets that make us queasily aware that you can convince of cases that you may not have been fully committed to but you felt were necessary. in the long run but with your right hand you're going to go on writing with from the fullness of the liberty that that will ultimately give. Does that square for you? Well it's a sort of post-romantic view of poetry gets in our way here. I mean the idea that poetry should somehow be above politics if it's contaminated

if it deals with the real world. This would have been unintelligible to the Renaissance. Poetry was for use and education and application and sometimes Milton writes in prose, sometimes he writes in poetry for an immediate political purposes, sonnets to Crumwell in 1615, In the 1552 is saying, here we have a particular crisis in the relationship between church and state. This is the way in which you must act. In the century and more between the poor Milton's time, there'd been a whole series of great statesmen who'd also have been great poets. You couldn't imagine that today.

Poetry is it's like religion as John Carroll. It has to do with the real world, practical world. I have to break from that a bit. I'm afraid. Well, it seems to me that what Milton had to do desperately at the end of the 1650s was quell his reason in some way. The fact is he was not going to write great poetry with his reason. What he wrote with his reason was the defense of the English people, the second defense, you know, with heaven's sake.

They're not great poetry, that's for sure. No one reads them now unless they're paid to. What he had to do was find a way of quelling his reason. He found a very extraordinary way he wrote in his sleep. Paraly's lost to the poem written in his sleep. It's the only great English poem apart from Kubla Khan written in sleep. No, no, it's a fact, of course.

I mean, he says so in the poem. His widow said what happened was that he slept, and he woke up with 20 or 30 lines of verse in his head, and he dictated them, then he knocked them into shape. And he says it came from the heavenly muse, Urania, and begs her to continue to inspire him. He cut himself off from reason in a remarkably efficient way, a deeply Freudian, of course it meant that he tapped into his unconscious.

It's a poem from the unconscious. That's why it's such a wonderful, That's why he isn't a political poem with it. The king is wrong. The king is God. The rebel, you know, Satan is a fascinating figure who. I mean, Blair says he wasn't a romantic poet. Well, the romantic poets thought he was and drew a lot of their inspiration from him.

Blake said he was the devil's party, you know. They were fascinated by this first great anti-God figure who was a hero. So it was all done by putting his reason away somewhere. We're using it only at a later stage when he had. had to make amendments to what God or the news had given him. When the Republic failed and the restoration came back without a shot being fired, in war, Charles II, great trepidation, but welcomes, peeps jumping up and down on the keys, away we go, the waters close over.

What did Milton think then? Did he think that some great enterprise had failed? Was he, as it were, driven to disper? Oh, it's a catholicmic. I mean, it's a most profound thing to have to come to terms with. He and so many people like him had given their lives to this cause, apart from the suspension of his poetic vocation. In 1641, these apocalyptic hopes have been so high and so cosmic.

And what's happened is that the Puritan cause has failed, not because it's been defeated on the battlefield. It's won it's battled. The royalists didn't have to fire a shot, as you say, to come back. They fall out among themselves. And for Milton, this is a terrible thing to have to come to terms with. He's decided they're corrupt, they're not worthy of the task that God has given them, and in 1660 they're punished for this, as one fellow Puritan says, God spat in our faces in

1660. And he has afterwards to come to terms with it. It seems to me that one of the things the great poems are doing is trying to come to terms with the prepundity of that reversal and to try to understand it. It's perhaps an intriguing thought. You think you would have written Paradise Lost, which John just been talking about, some Paradise Regan, and Samson Agonist. the Republic not being defeated?

I think that's where probably Blair and I take issue with John's romantic version of the poems because they do seem to be written from this kind of personal crisis which is not entirely a psychological crisis but is also a crisis of his reason about the failure, about the return of tyranny because of course what Milton saw as having happened before ever the revolution failed was that tyranny had returned in the protector. And the disappointment came before the spitting in the face of the Puritans. And that makes it worse, I think. I think Milton felt that not only had this been a collapse,

but that the people who had been entrusted with it had failed. Now the poem, it is very... We talk about Paradise Lost still, though. Paradise Lost. It is possible to read very strongly as fighting at a very high level of intellectual engagement with that struggle, the struggles against tyranny, whether it be in the heavens or on earth, whether it be against an omnipotent God or against the rulers of men, a very intense personal struggle for the space to be free if you can't

ever depend on anything except tyranny as the legislative order. So I must say I'm more in favor of the poems as being written out of that. disillusion and out of that personal crisis and therefore as being all right dreams all right dictated to him at night but nevertheless strongly shaped by reason would you say that Samson agonistice John Kerry was more is more susceptible to a political a poetic reflection of a political situation that Paradise Lost Samson loses his strength loses his hair has a high destiny but he finds himself eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves and so on so forth

Samsonagynistis is fascinating because San San San Francisco is, of course, about a suicide bomber. It's about a terrorist and a terrorist who, Milton by no means, so to speak, is on the side of. It's left in doubt he may be a terrorist who is disapproved of and indeed modern interpretation in San Francisco. He read it that way. They read it in a very American post-September 11th way.

It's quite interesting. Sandy Fish in his recent book on Milton. Milton defends Samson. That was the fourth, September 11th. I doubt if you would depend him now. Because he says, we can't criticize Samson because he believes he has God on his side and you can't ask for anything else. Well, you surely can. You can ask that you might be absolutely sure before you kill a lot of people. Samson does not and he may be criticized and that may be Milton looking back at the Civil War and I think he kept on changing his mind. He grew. Finally and very briefly, but I can't finish his bringing out this.

Was he in any sense reaching out to the people? Because his view of the people as a herd confused, a miscellaneous rival, isn't particularly attractive to us now. So we're not talking about Milton reaching out to the generality hour. We're talking about the sort of gentleman's inter-gentlemanly war. He didn't reach out. He was aiming at a gentlemanly elite. But the impact he had on the language reached out to everybody,

that is that our language was shaped by his style as it was by Shakespeare simultaneously. And therefore, he reached the people, though he didn't reach out to them. Yes. I mean, the people who do press most, if you like, for what we think of as a democratic mission of politics are the levelers. And what they want is frequent parliamentary elections, the answerability of parliaments to their electors. And Milton doesn't want that the fewer elections, the better.

He wants an elite, a elite of his early opponents. He found out was a serving man, a servant, and dared to write a pamphid against him. And he calls him a pork, I.E. pig, a flemy clod. And so on. So that, I mean, that was Milton's opinion of. someone from the proletariat who dared to speak out. Well, there you go. Thank you very much.

To Lisa Jardin, to John Carey and to Blair Urdin. And next week we'll be talking about the Buddha with Peter Harley, Kate Cosby and Mahinda de Ghali. Thank you. And thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.com. 2004.