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A Milton of Some People, by Some People,and for Some People:

A Review Essay

Angelica Duran

Theo Hobson. Milton’s Vision: The Birth of Christian Liberty. London: Con-tinuum, 2008. xiv + 178pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-84706-342-7. £16.99; $29.95(cloth).

H. R. Swardson. Understanding Christianity with Help from Dante and Milton.Booksurge Publishers, 2008. 144pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-41968-975-8. $16.99(paper).

John V. Knapp. Learning from Scant Beginnings: English Professor Expertise.Newark: U of Delaware P, 2008. 310pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-87413-026-3.$65.00 (cloth).

Dennis Danielson. Paradise Lost: Parallel Prose Edition. Vancouver, BC:Regent College Publishing, 2008. x + 559pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-57383-426-1.$24.95 (paper).

Now that the dust is settling from the 2008 quatercentenary commemorationsof the birth of John Milton, we are in a position to reflect on the publications of thatyear, those which received major attention, and those which did not but which stillcomprise the state of Milton at 400. Indeed, it was just in December 2010 thatMilton Quarterly was able to fit in a volume (44.4) of essays that emerged from thecommemorative symposium “Milton at 400 and at Stanford.” This review is part ofthe Milton Quarterly’s game of catch-up. It considers four books published in 2008that have yet to receive notice in this journal and that target a variety of potentialgroups of twenty-first century readers of Milton: the curious cabby, would-be greatteachers,“not-quite dummies,” and in one instance, certainly not any sneering “liter-ary critics” (see Hobson).

In the introduction to Milton’sVision, Theo Hobson sets out his thesis as clearlyas Milton does in Paradise Lost, not to “justify the ways of God to men” (PL 1.26)but rather to demonstrate Milton “as a great religious and political thinker–as agenuinely important resource for our time” (ix). Later, he makes the greater claimthat,“[i]n my theological opinion, Milton ought to be celebrated as England’s great-est religious thinker, and one of the few truly great Protestants” (169). Milton’sVisionis attentive to its general audience, as in the reference to the 1536 publicationof Calvin’s “big book, The Institutes of Christianity (‘The Institutes’ meaning ‘the

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basics’)” and “the errant theologian Miguel Servetus. . . . He was a Spanish human-ist heretic, who had fled the Spanish Inquisition” (14, 16); and clarification ofconcepts through contemporary references, as in the speculation of early modernBritish readers “finding the mythological excitement in Virgil and Ovid that isnowadays found in Tolkien or Harry Potter” (26) and in the alignment of ArgentineChe Guevera’s 1950 “motorbike trip round South America” with Milton’s Conti-nental tour “(minus the motorbike)” (54). There are, however, some bits of informa-tion that are left out that might be useful to a general readership, as when referringto “three men [who] had their ears cut off and their faces branded, on Laud’s orders,for attacking bishops in print” in 1637 (59). The book assumes a British, Protestantreadership, referring to the author’s British homeland with “our liberal constitution”and “those of whom are Christians” (xii, emphasis mine; see also 136). Yet perhapsnot even every good British schoolboy knows that those three are John Bastwick,Henry Burton, and William Prynne. Elsewhere, Hobson refers to “[o]ne elegy” thathas Milton’s disclaimer expressing “regret,” rather than Elegy 7; and on the samepage, to “his daughter” who “in 1646 became seriously ill, and never fully recov-ered,” rather than Anne Milton (91).

All readers should appreciate the care that Hobson takes in defining the over-lapping terms of his study. He distinguishes religious and national “freedom” and“unfreedom” (57); nicely defines Milton’s “using the Bible negatively—to countertraditional claims to Christian authority, rather than positively, to argue for newmoral and doctrinal rules” (132); and characterizes hypotheses as such, as when hewrites that “[i]t was probably Marvell who kept him safe from prosecution in the firstdangerous years of the Restoration” (139, emphasis mine). The book also has a niceoverall argumentative arc, for example, slowly building a case about the complexityof Constantine’s support of Christianity (37, 63, 131, 170). There are some libertiesthat contravene this general care: summarizing a scene in A Maske as “when herbrothers burst in and rescue her” (49), whereas the brothers botch the rescue thatthe Attendant Spirit designs, leaving it ultimately to Sabrina to bring about theLady’s release; labeling Milton’s tragedy Samson Agonistes an epic (76, 159); andasserting that Milton “helped to draft the Manifesto justifying the declaration of waragainst Spain” in 1655, when the jury is still out on Milton’s participation (119).

Milton’s Vision limits its potential strengths in terms of its important topic oftheology by its tendency to set up dichotomous positions. Early on, we are advisedthat,“Milton must not be left to the literary critics, with their inherited sneer towardhis thought, their lack of interest in theology, and their failure to see his mountingrelevance” (xi). Nigel Smith’s Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare?, published the sameyear as the cluster of books under review, is just one of many works by literary criticsthat intensely argues for Milton’s relevance. (Indeed, the final paragraph of Hobson’s“Conclusion” is very much in conversation with Smith’s fine book [173].) More-over, many literary critics have regularly attended to Milton in terms of theologyand religious studies. Hobson’s target audience would likely be familiar with C. S.Lewis’s autobiographical, fictional, and perhaps even critical works; so Lewis’schapter “The Theology of Paradise Lost” in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) couldhave been brought to bear on some of Hobson’s claims. Another literary critic whocomes readily to mind is Dennis Danielson, with his engagement with theodicy inMilton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (1982) and his 2008 book underreview below. The final chapters of Milton’s Vision, “Chapter 7: The Epics” and“Conclusion” contain misphrasing or are troubling in their dichotomizing use of

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Catholicism. The early chapters ascribe anti-Catholicism to “Milton’s vision,” to putthe book’s title to use:“he [Milton] could not tolerate Catholicism” (103). The laterchapters seem to present it as this book’s vision, as in the declamation that “Catholi-cism utterly lacks this spirit of liberal hope” (162), despite the fact that early Protes-tant reformers like Luther credited their Catholic tradition with providing themwith the many skills, including hope, to think through and articulate their protests,and despite the many twentieth-century popular and scholarly reflections detailingthe spirit of modern Catholic liberty. The “Conclusion” also makes large theologicalclaims that have played no substantial part in the preceding chapters, as in the state-ment that Milton “consistently sought to convey the absolute authority and theeschatological victory of the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ” (169). Perhapstrue, but a non sequitur in a work whose titular reference to Milton’s seminal role inthe development of “Christian liberty” is not substantiated.

H. R. Swardson’s Understanding Christianity with Help from Dante and Miltonshares the urgency of Theo Hobson’s book and also seeks to position Milton as aChristian theologian. In the introductory “To the Reader,” Swardson states that “[i]nall their liveliness [Dante and Milton] are as serious about Christian belief as anytheologian” but that they have the advantage of their poetic “language” (7). Comple-menting Milton’sVision, which dedicates more attention to Milton’s pre-Restorationpoetry and prose, Understanding Christianity focuses on Paradise Lost. While vastlydistinct in tenor and target audience, both these books are part of the early twenty-first century’s religious turn. I find it interesting that books that participate in thatturn in relation to literature struggle when dealing with Milton, even such impres-sive works as Malcolm Guite’s Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagina-tion (Chapter 5).

The target audience of Understanding Christianity governs the book’s colloquialpersona. The back cover advertises the book as “Christianity for not-quitedummies.” Even though Dante’s Divine Comedy is much longer than Paradise Lost,Understanding Christianity gives slightly more attention to the latter. Between the firstfour chapters dedicated to The Divine Comedy and the seven chapters dedicated toParadise Lost, are Chapters 5 and 6, which act as a bridge between the two authorsand their attendant historical moments, nations, languages, and versions of Chris-tianity, Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Protestantism. I will restrict my comments tothe latter sections, as they are of course in most direct conversation with the otherthree books under review.

Swardson’s concern with his target audience at times results in oversimplificationand subsequent misreadings. The following sentences use hyperbole and antanaclasisfor rhetorical effect:“With his hopes failing as fast as his eyesight he [Milton], old ageupon him, takes up his pen while his monarchist enemies, increasingly victorious, takeeverything else from him—his friends, his property, and, very nearly, his life. Behindhim lies a disastrous marriage” (73). It implies Milton losing hope and having marriedonly once. The first is debatable, the second corrected nowhere else in the book withreference to Milton’s other two marriages. A former member of the English faculty atOhio University, who published Poetry and the Fountain of Light (1962) and articles insuch journals as College English, Swardson is no doubt aware of the meaning of dif-ferent types of publication. Indeed, Swardson’s “Chapter 5: Milton” in Fountain ofLife, an early and persuasively eager component of the critical trend of discussing“tensions” (of “classical and Christian traditions” [104]), sounds the appropriatescholarly register for that work’s audience. His interests in Understanding Christianity

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are elsewhere, not on tension and a scholarly audience but rather on simplificationand a general audience, all of which helps to account for his decision to self-publish.

Self-publication can be viewed as an invitation to readers to engage with an eyeto improving the text for publication by a scholarly press that has greater resourcesfor advertising and dissemination than do individuals. Swardson’s UnderstandingChristianity can be seen as a genuine public service for the small audience that mighthappen upon the book, or as a foray to generate responses to be used for modifica-tions for a bulwarked version. Indeed, Swardson indicates that he anticipates onlyan American readership, as when he writes about the ease with which Americanreaders should embrace Romantic readings of Satan: “It shouldn’t be hard. You’rean American. You go for independence, liberty and defiance of a monarch. So youfeel a tingle” (83). Understanding Christianity assuredly deserves attention for thetown-and-gown events, or extension activities as they are now often called, thatcomprise such an important part of what active readers and scholars do with theirtime. In reading Understanding Christianity, I recognized a distinct form but shareddrive to convince readers that their efforts would be rewarded that I attempt toexpress in my own teaching and extension work; and I was exposed to a new set ofquestions and obstacles that general readers may encounter in their (laudatory)attempts to approach Paradise Lost, especially when doing so in tandem with TheDivine Comedy.

The daunting task of approaching and enjoying Milton’s works forms thefoundation for John V. Knapp’s Learning from Scant Beginnings. With its uniquefocus and method, Knapp’s book complements pedagogical tools available to Miltonreaders and teachers: the Modern Language Association’s Approaches toTeaching Para-dise Lost (1st edition 1986, 2nd edition forthcoming 2013) and Approaches to TeachingMilton’s Shorter Poetry and Prose (2008); and textbook-type companions, The Cam-bridge Companion to Milton (1989; 2nd edition 1999), as well as Blackwell’s A Com-panion to Milton (2001; 2003 paperback) and A Concise Companion to Milton (2006;2010 paperback).

Scant Beginnings is aimed at “the average person who wants to know what his orher offspring is getting from taking courses in literature departments at the univer-sity” and the “novice and perhaps some experienced teachers-of-literature-to-beas they struggle to become more expert teachers of imaginative literature” (25).“Chapter 1: Current Conversations in the Teaching of College-Level Literature” is acohesive, masterful evaluation of the major current topics of the pedagogy of litera-ture. The chapter’s epigraphs from John Guillory’s “The Very Idea of Pedagogy,”Paul Kamen’s Writing/Teaching, Stanley Fish’s “Aim Low,” and Frank Sinatra’s “OneMore For the Road,” reflect the breadth and depth of the conversation that Knappcreates. This chapter would contribute greatly to course readers for college- anduniversity-instructor training-courses for the teaching of literature.

Chapters 2 through 7 are accounts of Knapp’s “semester-long observation andanalysis of a single upper-division English class in order to describe in specific detailuniversity-level professorial expertise in the teaching of literature” (69). In “Chapter2: Step One, Scant Beginnings” and “Chapter 8: Study Discussion,” Knapp describesthe methods, limitations, student enrollment and characteristics, and other relevantdetails of the case study he details including his selection of the professorial expert,Professor William C. Johnson of Northern Illinois University, “Prof. J.” Chapter 2’sepigraph includes the quotation from which Scant Beginnings takes its title: “Anadequate account of how complex knowledge is built up from scant beginnings

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remains to be worked out.—[Carl] Bereiter and [Marlene] Scardamalia, SurpassingOurselves: [An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise (Open Court1993)]” (68). Knapp deftly coordinates Milton’s literary works and pedagogy withthe concept of expertise, the activation of which has always been chief to strongeducation. As such, at numerous points in these chapters, readers are indirectly butpowerfully put in conversation with key concepts in the works included in Knapp’sextensive bibliography and even others, ranging from Milton’s own pedagogicaltract Of Education (1644) to such globally-conscious works as Thomas Friedman’sTheWorld is Flat (2005; Updated and Expanded 2006; 3.0 2007).

In the eighth and final chapter, “Study Discussion,” Knapp articulates thelarge concerns that prompted his work, echoing Milton’s poignant fear that lackof good schooling in England is one of the factors “wherof this nation perishes”(CPW 2: 363) and Friedman’s delineation of the “Untouchables” with “the RightStuff” (Chapters 6 and 7 titles) for individuals’ and nations’ success: “[t]his studywas fueled in part by my concern that imaginative literature is often not taughtvery well in the university level” (187). Like Milton’s, Friedman’s, and others’useful works, Knapp’s limits his claims about what it can do in addressingand redressing his areas of concern. For all its successes, it is, after all, but onecase study. I find it important to supplement Knapp’s appropriate concessionswith brief attention to one that Knapp does not address: the gender limitationsof Prof. J.’s classroom practices. Data from The Chronicle of Higher Education andthe MLA regularly confirm my beliefs and experiences about how gender andother identities affect the teaching environment. When Knapp describes Prof. J.standing atop a desk to reinforce God’s high perspective in a discussion of “the lastquarter of Book II, Paradise Lost” (161-64), I immediately thought of a 2010 pam-phlet that my home university publishes about strong teaching, because it includes aphoto of a male colleague of mine, well recognized and awarded for his teaching,standing atop a desk at the front of a lecture hall during one of his classes. Whilemy wardrobe, training, and knowledge about data regarding student perceptions ofinstructor authority and sexuality combine with my personal and pedagogical per-sonas to prohibit me from emulating Prof. J.’s elevated stance, there is plenty in ScantBeginnings from which I have already benefited; and akin to Understanding Christian-ity, it provides me with useful descriptions of another set of important questions andmodes.

Dennis Danielson’s Paradise Lost: Parallel Prose Edition is the last and most well-known of the books under review. In an interview aired on Canadian radio on Mil-ton’s 400th birthday, Danielson identified his target audience as an educated popularreadership, whom he calls “consumer[s],” and his aim to make Milton’s epic “moreaccessible.” He has been successful avoiding “hugely dumbing it down” or “messingwith it” (Danielson CBC), if we can trust, as I think we should, Stanley Fish, whorightly adds another audience for the book in his review for his NewYorkTimes blog:Danielson “has fashioned a powerful pedagogical tool that is a gift to any teacher ofMilton whatever the level of instruction.” Fish focuses on some of Danielson’s diffi-cult choices in translating Milton’s poetic epic to English prose: the ambiguities ofthe fondly in Book 9’s famous assessment of the cause of Adam’s Fall, “fondly over-come by female charm” (999), which Danielson translates to “an infatuated foolovercome by a woman’s charms”; then a couple of examples from Book 1. Fishrightly notes that in these and other translating choices, Danielson “is not making amistake. He is making a choice.”

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Each local choice stems from Danielson’s initial choice to render the poeticepic in prose. In an e-interview, Danielson remarks that,

[t]o those who insist “Traduttore, traditore,” I can only protest that totranslate is really simply to interpret, and what’s wrong with that? Ialso appeal to my first experience, at about 20, of reading Homer’sOdyssey in E. V. Rieu’s prose translation for Penguin. Years later I wastold, disapprovingly, by a classicist that “Rieu rationalizes everything.”Well, maybe, but his efforts certainly turned me on to epic narrativein a way I don’t think another form would have.

Despite the benefits I too have received from works translated from other languages,I remained skeptical in approaching Danielson’s Parallel Prose Edition, akin toAndrew Marvell’s description in “On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost”: “misdoubting”(6). After all, Milton’s epic has not enjoyed as many or as high quality adaptations ashave William Shakespeare’s works: two cases in point are Joseph Lanzara’s ParadiseLost: The Novel (1994) and Jude Daly and Nancy Willard’s The Tale of Paradise Lost:Based on the Poem by John Milton (2004). (Margaret Hodges and Trina S. Hyman’sComus [1996] is an exception and exceptional, although targeted to children.)Happily,“soon growing less severe, I liked his project” (11-12). Danielson’s choice toinclude a poetic version of the epic on verso pages is an ever-present invitation tothe readers of the prose version to engage readily with the original. The choice ofincluding a poetic version is laudable enough, but Danielson goes a step further inproviding “that of Milton’s own first edition of 1667, corrected against the secondedition of 1674” (10), with all its now unstandard orthography and punctuation.

I also liked the project more and more as I repeatedly encountered Danielson’sacumen with tricky and often overlooked details. Two cases among the multitudeof references to harps deserve mention. Danielson catches the spirit of Milton’sinscription of the auditory beauty of harps and the frustrating inability of earthlyharps to stay tuned. Danielson manages to include the detail from Milton’s descrip-tion of the angels as they “thir gold’n Harps they took, / Harps ever tun’d” (3.365-66) in his parenthetical “harps forever in tune” (125). He thereby maintains thesubtle, persistent, and important comic undercurrent that we find also in, forexample, Milton’s ordering of the types of wood Adam conjectures for building fire,“Firr or Pine” (10.1076), placing first the most difficult to ignite, then the easiest toignite but least enduring. I wonder if Danielson unconsciously sought to help along“our Grand Parents” (1.29) in slipping in his translation “of pine or fir” (477), whichwould indeed make for a more successful fire. (Because the Parallel Prose Edition isavailable as print-on-demand, the error may already be corrected in versions newerthan mine.) In the second case, Danielson captures the joy of heavenly abundance byretaining the auditory image of “the sound / Symphonious of ten thousand Harpesthat tun’d / Angelic harmonies” (7.559-60). He preserves Milton’s imaginativedaring of envisioning harps—costly and therefore solo instruments, on earth—aspart of the immense ensemble in heaven: “the symphonic sounds of ten thousandharps vibrating with angelic harmonies” (321).

The success of Danielson’s Parallel Prose Edition encourages current and futurescholars to engage in acts of poetry-to-prose or language-to-other language transla-tions, either as a classroom exercise or for commercial publication. Danielson indi-cates translation to be a pleasurable and intellectually engaging task. He notes that he

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never paid much attention to the “flyting” at the end of Book 4, theapparently dangerous standoff between Satan and Gabriel. I lovedrendering that section because I sensed how much Milton was revel-ing in all the machismo and bravado . . . Gabriel uses high, senten-tious language [(4.1007-10) . . . ] But then he can’t resist getting inone more macho jab at Satan: “though doubled now / To tramplethee as mire.” I enjoyed highlighting this momentary feisty departurefrom Gabriel’s high rhetoric: “though my power, twice yours, couldtrample you like dirt.” Such classically epic scenes took me back toHomer and my own youthful first taste of epic warfare.

No less encouraging should be the positive reaction that Danielson has receivedfrom popular readers.

John Milton well understood the difficulty of gaining any audience: popular,educational, literary, and otherwise. In his pamphlet Of Education, he urges teachersand educational administrators to shape learning so that it catches the largestnumber of their target audience of students, from the “prime youth” to the “dullestand laziest youth, our stocks and stubbs” (CPW 2: 376), an early articulation of theaims for some of the No Child Left Behind educational policies in America. On theother hand, in Paradise Lost, the narrator articulates his desire for an “answerablestyle” that might “fit audience find, though few” (9.20, 7.31). By 1674, Milton hadclearly found such an audience in S. M. and Andrew Marvell, whose lyrics in praiseof the epic were printed in the second edition of Paradise Lost. By the quatercente-nary of Milton’s birth, the number and extent of his audience are large, but there arethose of us who would have them even larger, and not just within the “studiouscloister[s]” of academia (Il Penseroso 156) but also in the many quarters where theyhave already resonated. In American politics alone, we know of Thomas Jeffersonand John Adams’s extended correspondence on Paradise Lost, as they teased throughhow to build the republic; of Adlai Stevenson at the 1964 Democratic Conventionquoting Samson Agonistes—“what is strength without a double share / Of wisdom”(53-54)—to explain the responsibilities of foreign policy; and of currentVice Presi-dent Joseph Biden at a May 2011 gathering of U.S. forces encouraging troops byquoting Milton’s sonnet “ When I consider”:“ ‘They also serve who only stand andwait.’ Your families serve as well.” Milton has never been solely in the hands ofscholars. (Indeed the lines just quoted from Samson Agonistes grace a refrigeratormagnet that I prize from the Celestial Seasonings tea company.) But it is hearteningto see how many of Milton’s readers have extended and continue to extend theiropen palms to those willing and able to take what Milton and they have to offer,which indeed is so very much.

Purdue University

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