Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  Milton is unsatisfactory. The doubts which I have to express

  about him are more serious than these. His greatness as a poet has

  been sufficiently celebrated, though I think largely for the wrong

  reasons, and without the proper reservations. His misdeeds as a

  poet have been called attention to, as by Mr. Ezra Pound, but

  usually in passing. What seems to me necessary is to assert at the

  same time his greatness - in that what he could do well he did

  better than any one else has ever done - and the serious charges to

  be made against him, in respect of the deterioration - the peculiar

  kind of deterioration - to which he subjected the language.

  Many people will agree that a man may be a great artist, and

  yet have a bad influence. There is more of Milton's influence in

  the badness of the bad verse of the eighteenth century than of

  anybody's else : he certainly did more harm than Dryden and Pope,

  and perhaps a good deal of the obloquy which has fallen on these

  two poets, especially the latter, because of their influence, ought

  to be transferred to Milton. But to put the matter simply in terms

  of 'bad influence' is not necessarily to bring a serious charge :

  because a good deal of the responsibility, when we state the problem in these terms, may devolve on the eighteenth-century poets themselves for being such bad poets that they were incapable of

  being influenced except for ill. There is a good deal more to the

  charge against Milton than this ; and it appears a good deal more

  serious if we affirm that Milton's poetry could only be an influence

  Contributed to Essays and Studies of The English Association,

  Oxford University Press, 1936.

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  for the worse, upon any poet whatever. It is more serious, also, if

  we affirm that Milton's bad influence may be traced much farther

  than the eighteenth century, and much farther than upon bad

  poets : if we say that it was an influence against which we still have

  to struggle.

  There is a large class of persons, including some who appear in

  print as critics, who regard any censure upon a 'great' poet as a

  breach of the peace, as an act of wanton iconoclasm, or even

  hoodlumism. The kind of derogatory criticism that I have to

  make upon Milton is not intended for such persons, who cannot

  understand that it is more important, in some vital respects, to be

  a good poet than to be a great poet ; and of what I have to say I

  consider that the only jury of judgment is that of the ablest

  poetical practitioners of my own time.

  The most important fact about Milton, for my purpose, is his

  blindness. I do not mean that to go blind in middle life is itself

  enough to determine the whole nature of a man's poetry. Blindness must be considered in conjunction with Milton's personality and character, and the peculiar education which he received. It

  must also be considered in connection with his devotion to, and

  expertness in, the art of music. Had Milton been a man of very

  keen senses - I mean of all the five senses - his blindness would

  not have mattered so much. But for a man whose sensuousness,

  such as it was, had been withered early by book-learning, and

  whose gifts were naturally aural, it mattered a great deal. It would

  seem, indeed, to have helped him to concentrate on what he could

  do best.

  At no period is the visual imagination conspicuous in Milton's

  poetry. It would be as well to have a few illustrations of what I

  mean by visual imagination. From Macbeth :

  This guest of summer,

  The temple-haunting martlet, does approve

  By his loved mansionry that the heaven's breath

  Smells wooingly here: no jutt)', frieze,

  Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird

  Hath made his pendent bed and procrea11t cradle:

  Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed

  The air is delicate.

  It may be observed that such an image, as well as another familiar

  quotation from a little later in the same play,

  Light thickens, and the crow

  Makes wing to the rooky wood.

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  not only offer something t o die eye, but, so to speak, to the

  common sense. I mean that they convey the feeling of being in a

  particular place at a particular time: The comparison with Shakespeare offers another indication of the peculiarity of Milton. With Shakespeare, far more than with any other poet in English, the

  combinations of words offer perpetual novelty ; they enlarge the

  meaning of the individual words joined : thus 'procreant cradle',

  'rooky wood'. In comparison, Milton's images do not give this

  sense of particularity, nor are the separate words developed in

  significance. His language is, if one may use the term without disparagement, artificial and conventional.

  O'er the smooth enamel'd green . . .

  . . . paths of this drear wood

  The nodding horror of whose shady brows

  Threats the forlorn and wandering passenger.

  ('Shady brow' here is a diminution of the value of the two words

  from their use in the line from Dr. Faustus

  Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows.)

  The imagery in L' Allegro and 1/ Penseroso is all general :

  While the ploughman near at hand,

  Whistles o'er the furrowed land,

  And the milkmaid singeth blithe,

  And the mower whets his scythe,

  And every shepherd tells his tale,

  Under the hawthorn in the dale.

  It is not a particular ploughman, milkmaid, and shepherd that

  Milton sees (as Wordsworth might see them) ; the sensuous effect

  of these verses is entirely on the ear, and is joined to the concepts

  of ploughman, milkmaid, and shepherd. Even in his most mature

  work, Milton does not infuse new life into the word, as Shakespeare does.

  The sun to me is dark

  And silent as the moon,

  When she deserts the night

  Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.

  Here interlunar is certainly a stroke of genius, but is merely combined with 'vacant' and 'cave', rather than giving and receiving z6o

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  life from them. Thus it is not so unfair, as it might at first appear,

  to say that Milton writes English like a dead language. The criticism has been made with regard to his involved syntax. But a tortuous style, when its peculiarity is aimed at precision (as with Henry James), is not necessarily a dead one ; only when the complicatio� is dictated by a demand of verbal music, instead of by any demand of sense.

  Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,

  If these magnific titles yet remai11

  Not merely titular, since by decree

  Another now hath to himself engrossed

  All power, and us eclipsed u11der the name

  Of King anointed, for whom all this haste

  OJ midnight march, and hurried meeti11g here,

  This onl.J' to consult how we maJ' best

  With what maJ' be devised of honours new

  Receive him coming to receive from us

  Knee-tribute J1et unpaid, prostratio11 vile,

  Too much to one, but double how endured,


  To one and to his image now proclaimed ?

  With which compare :

  However, he didn't mind thinking that if Cissy should prove all that

  was likely enough their having a subject in common couldn't but

  practically conduce ; though the moral of it all amounted rather to a

  portent, the one that Haughty, by the same token, had done least to

  reassure him against, of the extent to which the native jungle harboured

  the female specimen and to which its ostensible cover, the vast level of

  mixed growths stirred wavingly in whatever breeze, was apt to be

  identifiable but as an agitation of the last redundant thing in ladies'

  hats.

  This quotation, taken almost at random from The Ivory Tower,

  is not intended to represent Henry James at any hypothetical

  'best', any more than the noble passage from Paradise Lost is

  meant to be Milton's hypothetical worst. The question is the

  difference of intention, in the elaboration of styles both of which

  depart so far from lucid simplicity. The sound, of course, is never

  irrelevant, and the style of James certainly depends for its effect

  a good deal on the sound of a voice, James's own, painfully

  explaining. But the complication, with James, is due to a determination not to simplify, and in that simplification lose any of the real intricacies and by-paths of mental movement ; whereas the

  complication of a Miltonic sentence is an active complication, a

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  complication deliberately introduced into what was a previously

  simplified and abstract thought. :rhe dark angel here is not thinking or conversing, but making a speech carefully prepared for him ; and the arrangement is for the sake of musical value, not for

  significance. A straightforward utterance, as of a Homeric or

  Dantesque character, would make the speaker very much more

  real to us ; but reality is no part of the intention. We have in fact

  to read such a passage not analytically, to get the poetic impression. I am not suggesting that Milton has no idea to convey which he regards as important : only that the syntax is determined by the

  musical significance, by the auditory imagination, rather than by

  the attempt to follow actual speech or thought. It is at least more

  nearly possible to distinguish the pleasure which arises from the

  noise, from the pleasure due to other elements, than with the verse

  of Shakespeare, in which the auditory imagination and the imagination of the other senses are more nearly fused, and fused together with the thought. The result with Milton is, in one sense of the word, rhetoric. That term is not intended to be derogatory.

  This kind of 'rhetoric' is not necessarily bad in its influence ; but

  it may be considered bad in relation to the historical life of a

  language as a whole. I have said elsewhere that the living English

  which was Shakespeare's became split up into two components

  one of which was exploited by Milton and the other by Dryden.

  Of the two, I still think Dryden's development the healthier,

  because it was Dryden who preserved, so far as it was preserved

  at all, the tradition of conversational language in poetry : and I

  might add that it seems to me easier to get back to healthy

  language from Dryden than it is to get back to it from Milton.

  For what such a generalization is worth, Milton's influence on the

  eighteenth century was much more deplorable than Dryden's.

  If several very important reservations and exceptions are made,

  I think that it is not unprofitable to compare Milton's development with that of James Joyce. The initial similarities are musical taste and abilities, followed by musical training, wide and curious

  knowledge, gift for acquiring languages, and remarkable powers

  of memory perhaps fortified by defective vision. The important

  difference is that Joyce's imagination is not naturally of so purely

  auditory a type as Milton's. In his early work, and at least in part

  of Ulysses, there is visual and other imagination of the highest

  kind ; and I may be mistaken in thinking that the later part of

  Ulysses shows a turning from the visible world to draw rather on

  the resources of phantasmagoria. In any case, one may suppose

  that the replenishment of visual imagery during later years has

  been insufficient ; so that what I find in Work in Progress is an

  auditory imagination abnormally sharpened at the expense of the

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  visual. There is still a little to be seen, and what there is to see is

  worth looking at. And I would repeat that with Joyce this development seems to me largely due to circumstances : whereas Milton may be said never to have seen anything. For Milton, therefore,

  the concentration on sound was wholly a benefit. Indeed, I find,

  in reading Paradise Lost, that I am happiest where there is least to

  visualize. The eye is not shocked in his twilit Hell as it is in the

  Garden of Eden, where I for one can get pleasure from the verse

  only by the deliberate effort not to visualize Adam and Eve and

  their surroundings.

  I am not suggesting any close parallel between the 'rhetoric' of

  Milton and the later style of Joyce. It is a different music ; and

  Joyce always maintains some contact with the conversational tone.

  But it may prove to be equally a blind alley for the future development of the language.

  A disadvantage of the rhetorical style appears to be, that a dislocation takes place, through the hypertrophy of the auditory imagination at the expense of the visual and tactile, so that the

  inner meaning is separated from the surface, and tends to become

  something occult, or at least without effect upon the reader until

  fully understood. To extract everything possible from Paradise

  Lost, it would seem necessary to read it in two different ways, first

  solely for the sound, and second for the sense. The full beauty of

  his long periods can hardly be enjoyed while we are wrestling with

  the meaning as wel l ; and for the pleasure of the ear the meaning is

  hardly necessary, except in so far as certain key-words indicate

  the emotional tone of the passage. Now Shakespeare, or Dante,

  will bear innumerable readings, but at each reading all the

  elements of appreciation can be present. There is no interruption

  between the surface that these poets present to you and the core.

  While therefore, I cannot pretend to have penetrated to any

  'secret' of these poets, I feel that such appreciation of their work

  as I am capable of points in the right direction ; whereas I cannot

  feel that my appreciation of Milton leads anywhere outside of the

  mazes of sound. That, I feel, would be the matter for a separate

  study, like that of Blake's prophetic books ; it might be well worth

  the trouble, but would have little to do with my interest in the

  poetry. So far as I perceive anything, it is a glimpse of a theology

  that I find in large part repellent, expressed through a mythology

  which would have better been left in the Book of Genesis, upon

  which Milton has not improved. There seems to me to be a division, in Milton, between the philosopher or theologian and the poet ; and, for the latter, I suspect also that this concentrati
on

  upon the auditory imagination leads to at least an occasional

  levity. I can enjoy the roll of

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  . . . Cambula, seat ofCathaian Can

  And Samarchand by ,Oxus, Temir's throne,

  To Paquin of Sinaean kings, and thence

  To Agra and Lahor of great Mogul

  Down to the golden Chersonese, or where

  The Persian in Ecbatan sate, or since

  In Hispahan, or where the Russian Ksar

  On Mosco, or the Sultan in Bizance,

  Turchestan-born . . .

  ,

  and the rest of it, but I feel that this is not serious poetry, not

  poetry fully occupied about its business, but rather a solemn game.

  More often, admittedly, Milton uses proper names in moderation,

  to obtain the same effect of magnificence with them as does Marlowe - nowhere perhaps better than in the passage from Lycidas : Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,

  Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide

  Visit' st the bottom of the monstrous world;

  Or whether thou to our moist vows deny' d

  Sleep's! by the fable of Bellerus old,

  Where the great vision of the guarded Mount

  Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold . . .

  than which for the single effect of grandeur of sound, there is

  nothing finer in poetry.

  I make no attempt to appraise the 'greatness' of Milton in

  relation to poets who seem to me more comprehensive and better

  balanced ; it has seemed to me more fruitful for the present to

  press the parallel between Paradise Lost and Work in Progress ;

  and both Milton and Joyce are so exalted i n their own kinds, i n the

  whole of literature, that the only writers with whom to compare

  them are writers who have attempted something very different.

  Our views about Joyce, in any case, must remain at the present

  time tentative. But there are two attitudes both of which are

  necessary and right to adopt in considering the work of any poet.

  One is when we isolate him, when we try to understand the rules

  of his own game, adopt his own point of view : the other, perhaps

  less usual, is when we measure him by outside standards, most

  pertinently by the standards of language and of something called

  Poetry, in our own language and in the whole history of European