Jangling Monarchy 
Tom Paulin
- A Companion to Milton by Thomas N. Corns
- The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography by Barbara K. Lewalski
In 1936, with the Spanish Civil War begun and world war on the horizon, the distinguished Scottish scholar and editor of Donne, H.J.C. Grierson, gave a series of lectures on Milton and Wordsworth, which began by addressing the attacks on Milton that T.S. Eliot and his acolytes were mounting. The revival of interest in metaphysical poetry, which Grierson had done so much to stimulate, had prompted critics to discuss the connection between form and content in poetry: ‘The favourite phrase is “unified sensibility”. We are told a little pontifically that this unified sensibility was disturbed by the great influence of Milton, so that the natural medium of our thought has become exclusively prose.’ Grierson must have smelt reaction in Eliot’s royalist rejection of Milton’s republican poetics.
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Tom Paulin’s most recent book is Crusoe’s Secret. His study of poetic form, The Secret Life of Poems, will be published in January.
Other articles by this contributor:
In the Workshop · Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Entrepreneurship · Ted Hughes and the Hare
Diary · Trimble’s virtues
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