from my email: Lauren Kane on Milton

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more #01: All mouths were opened Introducing a series on John Milton's prose. John Milton became a pamphleteer at around age thirty. It was something of a chemical reaction: personal stagnation was met by grief, which then met with absolute sociopolitical bedlam in England in the 1630s. Before then, Milton had spent most of his twenties, after getting his degree from Cambridge, largely sulking around his parents’ house and putting off applying to the clergy. Then several things happened in relatively quick succession: He went abroad to Italy (having never been much farther from suburban London than Cambridge). While traveling, he receives the devastating news that his friend Charles Diodati, the person to whom he was closest, has died. Milton returns to England and writes his last poem in Latin, Epitaphium Damonus, an elegy, a mourning. The country he returned to was utterly chaotic. Amid the play-dirty mud-wrestling for power happening between crown, church, and state, in July 1641 Parliament abolished the court of the Star Chamber, which had for the previous century and a half been censoring published writing in England using increasingly corrupt procedures to dole out severe, often physical, punishments on unruly writers. Unleashed was a new chattering class: between 1560 and 1620, the number of students enrolled at Cambridge had tripled. All of these university men would have been trained in rigorous argumentation, and were now armed with paper and ink and the permission to publish what they had to say. Milton, the son of a scrivener, had managed, largely through education, something like upward social mobility; he and others like him would not have taken for granted the world around them, and no doubt saw how drastically it could be changed by the application of mind and will. The profusion of pamphlets, and pamphleteers, was huge—most of them lost now, melted in the rain or swept down a London gutter. Milton wrote of this moment that “all mouths were opened,” his included. Pamphlets were kind of publishing that was cheap to do and cheap to buy, easy to get quickly into the hands of readers. His writing came full-throated and thunderous, and witty, and arrogant, and personal. Today, infuriating as often as it is invigorating. The prose can be overfull; there is not a single short sentence. But even so, these tracts are clear-eyed and purposeful in their arguments, in the hot-blooded art of polemic. In the words of a biographer, Milton “almost single-handedly created the identity of the writer as political activist.”¹ He takes to the work with haughtiness; in Apology against a Pamphlet, he states that his “purpose is not, nor hath been formerly, to look on my adversary abroad, through the deceiving glass of other mens’ great opinion of him, but at home, where I may find him in the proper light of his own worth.” Do not mistake him; this examination will not be an exercise in balance. His debut: “Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England,” published in 1641. This series of newsletters will take up each of Milton’s prose writings in turn: religion, England, censorship, marriage, monarchy. I’ve wanted to spend time with these documents for almost a decade, harboring what has proven an unshakeable fascination with the inner life of this infinitely strange and difficult poet. I believe also that these documents ought to be coaxed out from the great shadow of Milton’s poetry, and at the same time brought to bear on the poetry itself. Reading Paradise Lost means taking the politics of the man, like it or not. Here, instead of starting with the poem, run the equation backward. There is not much in the pamphlets that can’t also to be found in his masterpiece Paradise Lost, and many other works in verse. It is also the aim to dust off an image that lingers with us of an old blind poet writing about the Bible. There was before him a young man with a radical vision of something like modernity at his fingertips.