Simon Heffer: John Milton was a poet and a freedom fighter
[Simon Heffer is a British journalist and writer.]
One of the most dangerous things a great artist can do is to compose one work by which he is always remembered, to the detriment of all else he has done. Who can list the accomplishments of Leonardo beyond the Mona Lisa? How many can name the creations of Pugin beyond the interior of the House of Lords? Or cite the many masterpieces Holst wrote besides The Planets?
We all know that John Milton, born 400 years ago yesterday, wrote Paradise Lost. It is hard to pass beyond that, apparently: and when one encounters what Eliot called "the poetry of the sublime" in that epic, does it not put all else into the shade? Was it not, indeed, the point of Milton's life, as defined by him? Eight years at Cambridge, six years reading at his father's country house, and a belated and truncated grand tour of Italy were the conscious preparation for what he saw to be the task ordained for him by God, of a poet: and one who would, as he put it when he finally came to write the epic in his late fifties, "assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men".
It is hard to go beyond Paradise Lost. One could spend (and some have spent) a lifetime considering the nature of its composition, dissecting Milton's quite peculiar brand of religious thought as displayed within it, noting the originality of his language (a tour through the Oxford English Dictionary reveals just how many words were coined by him) and revelling in the sheer and subtle musicality of his verse.
Here was a man largely uninfluenced by the titans of the English canon before him – Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare. His inspiration was from Homer, Virgil and Dante. He was England's own renaissance man, and this steeping in the classics was what made him our greatest poet:
High on a throne of royal state,
which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and
of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with
richest hand
Showers on her Kings barbaric
pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence.
Those magnificent lines are not merely an object lesson in word-painting, or in sonorities: the quotation comes to a crashing halt with a knowing paradox that laces all before it with irony. For Milton was a journalist.
In this newspaper on Monday, A. N. Wilson, Milton's finest living biographer, evoked Wordsworth's call, during England's tribulations at the start of the 19th century, that Milton should "be living at this hour". The quotation goes on; "England hath need of thee." To Wordsworth, it was Milton's power to illuminate that the England of the Napoleonic Wars needed – "Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:/Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free". Now, our liberties threatened by the state, we need his power to see truth and articulate it without fear for the consequences.
Milton influenced generations of poets after him, not least Wordsworth himself: but it is less well known, or appreciated, that he influenced generations of political thinkers, down to the present day...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
One of the most dangerous things a great artist can do is to compose one work by which he is always remembered, to the detriment of all else he has done. Who can list the accomplishments of Leonardo beyond the Mona Lisa? How many can name the creations of Pugin beyond the interior of the House of Lords? Or cite the many masterpieces Holst wrote besides The Planets?
We all know that John Milton, born 400 years ago yesterday, wrote Paradise Lost. It is hard to pass beyond that, apparently: and when one encounters what Eliot called "the poetry of the sublime" in that epic, does it not put all else into the shade? Was it not, indeed, the point of Milton's life, as defined by him? Eight years at Cambridge, six years reading at his father's country house, and a belated and truncated grand tour of Italy were the conscious preparation for what he saw to be the task ordained for him by God, of a poet: and one who would, as he put it when he finally came to write the epic in his late fifties, "assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men".
It is hard to go beyond Paradise Lost. One could spend (and some have spent) a lifetime considering the nature of its composition, dissecting Milton's quite peculiar brand of religious thought as displayed within it, noting the originality of his language (a tour through the Oxford English Dictionary reveals just how many words were coined by him) and revelling in the sheer and subtle musicality of his verse.
Here was a man largely uninfluenced by the titans of the English canon before him – Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare. His inspiration was from Homer, Virgil and Dante. He was England's own renaissance man, and this steeping in the classics was what made him our greatest poet:
High on a throne of royal state,
which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and
of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with
richest hand
Showers on her Kings barbaric
pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence.
Those magnificent lines are not merely an object lesson in word-painting, or in sonorities: the quotation comes to a crashing halt with a knowing paradox that laces all before it with irony. For Milton was a journalist.
In this newspaper on Monday, A. N. Wilson, Milton's finest living biographer, evoked Wordsworth's call, during England's tribulations at the start of the 19th century, that Milton should "be living at this hour". The quotation goes on; "England hath need of thee." To Wordsworth, it was Milton's power to illuminate that the England of the Napoleonic Wars needed – "Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:/Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free". Now, our liberties threatened by the state, we need his power to see truth and articulate it without fear for the consequences.
Milton influenced generations of poets after him, not least Wordsworth himself: but it is less well known, or appreciated, that he influenced generations of political thinkers, down to the present day...