Milton and the Victorians

Erik Gray. and the Victorians. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2009. Milton's on the Victorians has hitherto received surprisingly little attention. Many books and articles have been written on and the Romantics, but only two previous critics - James Nelson in Sublime Puritan (1963) and Anna K Nardo in George Eliot's Dialogue with (2003) - have written books on Milton's reception by the Victorians. It would be easy infer that Milton's abruptly stopped at about the time De Doctrina Christiana was discovered in 1 823. Gray states the problem succinctly: By general consensus, at least implicit, Milton's sometimes overwhelming on forty years of English poetry came abrupt halt with the deaths of Keats, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron in the 1820s. But Gray knows better than settle for easy answers: There are two things be said about this view: first, that it is clearly false, and second, that it is just as clearly (3). It is false because the Victorians showed new interest in Milton's prose and produced monumental biographies and editions (by Thomas Keightley and David Masson). It is true because Milton's upon Victorian poetry is inconspicuous: a list of major Romantic poems - Prelude, Prometheus Unbound, Hyperion - immediately, insistently calls mind Milton's epic, as similar list of Victorian masterpieces - Aurora Leigh, Idylls of the King, Ring and the Book - does (4). In Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence, Milton's always ends in the same place: 'Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, . . . Keats' (5). continues exert on the Victorians, Gray infers, it is different from his on the Romantics. Gray examines Mlton's in the later nineteenth century in attempt to find out what it teach us about Victorian literature above all, but also about Romanticism, about Milton, and about forms of poetic influence (9). His thesis, explored through six erudite chapters, is that great poets like can continue exert powerful while largely disappearing from view (24). In his second chapter, entitled Milton as Classic, as Bible, Gray likens Milton's invisibility that of God in Paradise Lost: The very fact that Romantic poets so frequently and self-consciously invoked rendered it unnecessary for Victorian poets do the same. result was that Milton, like God, became with excessive bright (25). Gray is particularly good on Milton's ability make the unfamiliar seem familiar. His second chapter begins with splendid discussion of Milton's exotic names and the fact that they so often appear in negative similes that tell us what Hell or Paradise or Eve's beauty were not like. T. S. Eliot, following thought that used epic catalogues for their musical value alone, but Gray makes the persuasive and (so far as I am aware) original argument that Milton's catalogues and negative similes have the mysterious effect of making us feel at home with the exotic. big names are not pompous displays of encyclopedic pedantry but concessions the fallen reader's presumed knowledge: Johnson, or T. S. Eliot, might object that 'Ternate and Tidore' are mystifying and grandiloquent words, introduced inflate the image. But the opposite is true: they are part of the mortal world, as Satan is not, and even if we have never heard of them before, we recognize them as concessions our knowledge (30-31). result is an uncanny sense of familiarity. Gray relates this the dark brilliance of classic literature. If (as Mark Twain quipped) classic is a book which people praise but don't read, less cynical definition might be that classic is work that seems be known before it is read. A great book be read; classic only be reread, since the first-time reader finds it already familiar (32). …

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