Jangling Monarchy

Tom Paulin

  • A Companion to Milton by Thomas N. Corns
    Blackwell, 528 pp, £80.00, June 2001, ISBN 0 631 21408 9
  • The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography by Barbara K. Lewalski
    Blackwell, 816 pp, £25.00, December 2000, ISBN 0 631 17665 9

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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Vol. 24 No. 15 · 8 August 2002 » Tom Paulin » Jangling Monarchy (print version)
Pages 25-29 | 6932 words