The Annotated Milton: Complete English Poems Read Free

Spenser” (42), and three more “Spenserian Stanzas” aimed in 1819 at Charles Armitrage Brown, in response (in Keats’ own words) to “Brown this morning…writing some Spenserian stanzas against Mrs., Miss [Fanny] Brawne and me.”
    And Spenser’s reach extends, as I have indicated, a good century further. In an 1858 letter to his sister, sent from Oxford, John Addington Symonds requests that he be sent his copy of Spenser (the request placed, in sequence, between Chaucer and “the large Milton” [ The Letters of John Addington Symonds , I, 167]). In another letter home the next year, he asks, “Has a small Spenser in 6 diamond volumes, come for me from Jeffries in Redcliffe Street? I ordered it when I was last in Clifton” (I, 200). Nor did Symonds’ interest flag in later years. Almost thirty years along, he writes to Edmund Gosse, 16 May 1886, from Germany, expressing genuine concern about the possible misattribution of a sixteenth-century poem the style of which “seems to me suspiciously like that of Spenser” (III, 139). Writing in 1896 from his prison cell in Reading, Oscar Wilde requested “Spenser’s Poems,” among other books ( The Letters of Oscar Wilde , 405 n). And, finally, in August 1912 Edward Dowden writes that “most of my reading hours were given to Spenser, and once again I went through the ‘Faerie Queene’ (though I can’t say, as Southey did, that I have read it once a year” [ Letters of Edward Dowden, 381]).
    Yet Milton not only participates in a long and strong tradition, connecting to it in more ways than I can here comment upon, but he has always been, and still remains, an immensely significant, powerful contributor to that tradition. He draws upon Shakespeare (he was born eight years before Shakespeare’s death), as has everyone else. But he also adds to Shakespeare, as most others neither have done nor could do.
     
    He scarce had ceased when the superior fiend
    Was moving toward the shore, his ponderous shield,
    Ethereal 1 temper, 2 massy, large, and round,
    Behind him cast. The broad circumference
    Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
    Through optic glass the Tuscan 3 artist 4 views
    At evening, from the top of Fesolé,
    Or in Valdarno, to descry 5 new lands,
    Rivers, or mountains in her spotty 6 globe.
    His spear—to equal which the tallest pine
    Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast
    Of some great ammiral, 7 were but a wand 8 —
    He walked with, to support uneasy 9 steps
    Over the burning marl, 10 not like those steps
    On Heaven’s azure. And the torrid clime
    Smote 11 on him sore besides, vaulted 12 with fire.
PARADISE LOST , 1:284–98
     
    The sweep and grandeur of this portrait of Satan, struggling to preserve his dignity (not to mention his power) even though newly fallen from the glories of heaven to the sulfurous and smoking fields of hell, is unmatchable in English verse. Virgil and even Homer, had they seen (or heard) Milton’s description of the “ponderous shield, / Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round, / Behind him cast,” the “broad circumference” of which “Hung on his shoulders like the moon,” would have recognized and perhaps envied a colleague in and competitor for poetic glory. Milton’s uniquely majestic rhetoric, his commanding poetic “voice,” seem almost the effect of some marvelously benign Midas touch, turning even tawdriness into magnificent resonance.
    It is not difficult, of course, to find this side of Milton, especially in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes but also, in different and younger ways, in Lycidas and, fittingly, in his quite early “On Shakespeare,” probably written when he was only twenty-two. This is the Milton of whom Douglas Bush could declare, “Whoever the third of English poets may be [Shakespeare and Chaucer being overwhelming consensus choices for numbers I and 2], Milton’s place has been next to the throne” ( English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century , 359). But