How is it possible to like Milton?

Shall I go on?

Colin Burrow

• The Complete Works of John Milton. Vol. VIII: De Doctrina Christiana edited by John Hale and J. Donald Cullington
  Oxford, 1263 pp, £225.00, September 2012, ISBN 978 0 19 923451 6
• Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-42 edited by Edward Jones
  Oxford, 343 pp, £60.00, November 2012, ISBN 978 0 19 969870 7
• The Complete Works of John Milton. Vol. III: The Shorter Poems edited by Barbara Lewalski and Estelle Haan
  Oxford, 632 pp, £125.00, October 2012, ISBN 978 0 19 960901 7

The quatercentenary of Milton’s birth was in 2008. The celebratory shenanigans – the conferences, public lectures, biographies and privy pieces of self-promotion that in our wicked age accompany all major anniversaries – are over. But one key question remains unanswered. How is it possible to like Milton?

There is certainly a great deal to dislike. Most people would think of him as an overlearned poet who combines labyrinthine syntax with a wide range of moral and intellectual vices. His views on sex and women, for example, were mostly gruesome. In Paradise Lost he described the perfect union of loving angels with beguiling delight: ‘If Spirits embrace,/Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure/Desiring’. But in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he declared that if mortals didn’t find a perfect spiritual mate they could end up having to ‘grind in the mill of an undelighted and servil copulation’. ‘Grind’ is such a terrible verb to use there. It combines traces of the abject Samson, milling for the Philistines, with simple lack of mortal lubrication in a way that makes you feel it’s a very bad idea indeed to be made of flesh.
Even in the prelapsarian world imagined in Paradise Lost women are condemned to a secondary relationship to the divine. 
Milton’s most dislikeable line – ‘Hee for God only, shee for God in him’ – suggests that Eve spent all day gazing at Adam for shadows of reflected divinity. When Adam eats the apple he is described as being ‘fondly overcome with Femal charm’. Not all of Paradise Lost is quite that hard on Eve, with whom Milton at his kinder moments seems to be almost in love, and whom he sometimes treats as a virtual embodiment of the wayward poetic fancy. But it is not difficult to hear in Milton’s works the grating sound of misogyny emerging through the frictions of the flesh.

Full article at 

Colin Burrow is a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.