Why Milton Matters
Fall 2006 Mellby Lecture
Richard DuRocher, professor of English
October 19, 2006

First, thanks to Carol Holly, for the lovely introduction; to Jonathan Hill, for the text of the flyer in your inimitable style; to David Gonnerman and Trent Chaffee for publicity; to the FDC, chaired by Jeanine Grenberg, for inviting me to speak; to Pam Dresow, for providing the reception; special thanks to Timothy Mahr, who served as "shepherd" to the many details involved in promoting and arranging this talk. I didn't expect to see so many friends in the audience; thank you all for coming. Finally, how do I thank the woman who has been my cook, nurse, chauffeur since this foot surgery? Thank you, Karen, for abiding with me.

There's a set of books here in front of me that you may wish to look at later. As Carol referred to my work on the new Milton Variorum project, they have a certain relevance. This is Henry Todd's first variorum edition of Milton, which he finished in 1801. This set, a gift to me from my late teacher Scott Elledge, dates from 1832. I don't know who owned these books, but I like to think that Ralph Waldo Emerson might have used them, as they were brought at some point to New England; or that a young William Wordsworth or Mary Shelley might have read them in England. Juli Overby from the library has lovingly rebound the set so that I can continue to use them; thank you Juli.

The Mellby lecturers are supposed to "exemplify the liberal arts education to which St. Olaf College is committed: excellence marked by comprehensiveness, intellectual seriousness and creativity." This is a dizzying notion. When I was invited to give a Mellby lecture, my first emotion was, frankly, a feeling of humbling mixed with fear. The invitation from the FDC took me back to an invitation I received during my first Fall at St. Olaf. Several of us were invited out to Jim May's new, beautiful, but unroofed home south of town. Jim somehow learned that I had roofed houses as a young man in Florida. So, on a fine September weekend I found myself attaching cedar shingles to the roof of Jim's garage. On the roof with me was Norm Watt, my new partner in The Great Conversation program, from whom I would learn so much that year. Occasionally, voices would call to us from the other roof, from the housetop, sometimes in Latin or Greek. Lloyd Gunderson, longtime classics professor and I, entered a lively debate about Thucydides, the author of The History of the Peloponnesian War. Between the ringing of our hammers, we debated whether Thucydides' work was more a piece of poetry or history. That was my real introduction to St. Olaf College. Since then, I've had the opportunity to do no less substantial work with many outstanding female colleagues as well, such as packing books for English department book sales with Mary Titus and reading placement essays with Mary Steen and others. But in important ways, little has changed at the college since that Fall weekend of roofing 20 years ago. We still hang out in precarious positions, doing impossible jobs, with inadequate compensation. We still talk about good books, and engage in lively conversation about them, with colleagues whom we come to learn from, disagree with, and if we're lucky, learn to treasure. To all my colleagues, thank you.

As you have heard, I am, in a word, a Miltonist. That doesn't mean that I agree with Milton about everything or would want to live over his life, or the 17th century with him. Nor does it mean I include Paradise Lost in every course I teach. Students in my current classes can attest that Gweldolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, and Shakespeare are the authors we're dealing with this week. Being a Miltonist does, however, mean that I have devoted my scholarly career to making sense of his writings. The question was never-would Rich talk about Milton tonight—but would he talk about anything else? Well, "anything else" lost out in an early draft. If it's any consolation, so did Karen's inspired title, "To variorum or not to variorum." I objected that it made my current research project sound like that of a famously depressed Dane.

What may not be so readily clear is that the topic I have chosen, "Why Milton matters," is a live, animating question for me. It challenges not simply my commitment to this writer but more fundamentally the merit of anyone doing so. Certainly my work on Milton has been a source of pride and joy to me, but even positive reviews and enormous royalty checks are no guarantee that one's work truly has made a difference to anyone else. Does my work sometimes fail that test? Suppose we add as well a Mellby-like breadth test: How does my work on Milton serve St. Olaf's mission to educate students in the liberal arts? How well does my work match Carl Mellby's concern to promote scholarship that is truly wide-ranging, even comprehensive in its scope? And to what extent is Milton, much less scholarly commentary on Milton, relevant to people's lives and concerns today? Do I seriously believe that reading Milton, even writing about Milton as I do, contributes anything to our present cultural predicament? Granted that relatively few readers today are in the habit of reading poetry, especially older poetry, I accept the limitation of Milton's potential appeal to a self-selecting audience. In Paradise Lost, Milton says that he hopes to find a "fit audience, though few." As a Milton scholar, I seek a no less fit audience, though fewer. But let me share with you my greatest hope, that some of you will go out from here to read Milton's poetry after my talk tonight. The question then becomes: Can Milton speak to readers today? Does Milton matter, and if so, how?

For me, Milton's significance is bound up with three phrases that will echo throughout my talk: "discriminating freedom," "the rhetoric of heroism," and "searching for wisdom and beauty." What I hope to show above all is that Milton represents these ideas in his writing. Mightily and creatively, Milton struggles to depict these notions of freedom, heroism, and searching through the characters and plots of his poems. Thus, most of my time tonight will involve looking over three of them: Samson, in the tragedy, Samson Agonistes; Satan in the epic Paradise Lost, and a Latin letter Milton wrote early in his career to his best friend. Among contemporary literary criticism, my three phrases—"discriminating freedom," "the rhetoric of heroism," and "searching for wisdom and beauty"—have a quaint, old-fashioned tone, and they may be potentially off-putting to some of you. Yet I highlight these terms precisely because they are little heard in the academy today, while our hunger for the values they represent, I believe, remains keen.

Before offering my distinct answer to the question "why Milton matters," I want to begin by catching you up on a recent dialogue among celebrated scholars on that very question. Three distinguished Miltonists—Stanley Fish, then of the U of Illinois, Chicago; Barbara Lewalski of Harvard, and Joseph Wittreich of the Graduate Center of CUNY—were invited to address that question at a recent conference, and their essays were published in the 2005 issue of the scholarly journal, Milton Studies. Here, in a nutshell, were their answers. Fish rephrased the question why Milton matters slightly to read, "matters as what?" Much virtue in that rephrasing, a quintessential scholarly move. In response to that question, Fish gave the unequivocal answer: "as a poet." Fish applied a kind of "desert island" test to assess Milton's contributions in other fields—political theory, theology, philosophy, education—vis a vis those of his accomplished contemporaries, such as John Locke, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, and Jan Comenius. By comparison, Fish concludes, Milton's achievements in those fields are slight. Fish is, I think, too quick to dismiss Milton's contributions to disciplines other than literature. In particular, the argument for liberty of the press that Milton presents in his speech, Areopagitica, is often cited in legal histories as strongly motivating legislation against censorship, including the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Yet finally I agree with Fish that Milton's lasting contributions come in and through his poetry. The rest of Fish's essay amounts to a diatribe against the trend of recent scholarship to focus on topics other than Milton's poetry itself. For example, Fish takes aim at Stephen Dobranski's award-winning study, Milton and the Book Trade, which despite its meticulous research on how the poet was involved in the actual printing, marketing, and selling of his books, Fish criticized as basically misguided. However erudite, such research, in Fish's view, "cannot settle anything, cannot determine or even help you to determine what the text means." In case you missed it, "what the text means" and only that is what Fish believes commentary on Milton and all literary criticism should be about.

Barbara Lewalski countered that Fish's demand for "pure poetry" is itself potentially misguided. Milton himself, in one of his memorable statements on poetry, insisted that the true poet is one who personally intertwines life and art, composing one's life into a true poem. But Lewalski otherwise agreed with Fish that, for her as well, it's finally Milton's poetry that counts. The thrust of Lewalski's rationale for that conclusion was humanistic: Milton, she wrote, "should matter to us especially for the imaginative representation of human experience and human possibility rendered in his great poems." As reasonable as Lewalski's broadly inclusive humanism might seem, Milton's actual grasp of human nature within his epic poem, Paradise Lost, was challenged long ago by the most important critic of the 18th century, Samuel Johnson, in his Life of Milton. While the vast design of Milton's poem won the critic's praise, Johnson found its angels, demons, and unfallen Adam and Eve—even its bardic narrator who unfolds their cosmic story—characters whom readers can scarcely recognize as fellow human beings. "The plan of Paradise Lost has this inconvenience," Johnson wrote," in "that is comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The man and woman who act and suffer [in the Garden] are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know." Thus, Johnson concluded, "The want of human interest is always felt." More recently, celebrations of Milton's universalist representation of humanity have been attacked from a different angle. That is, they have been labeled "essentialist" by some contemporary literary theorists, who believe that such notions as "human possibility" and "great poems" are meaningless, untenable constructs. The anti-essentialist stance that there are no absolutes such as "truth," "great literature," or even "persons" or "authors" began as a useful post-Romantic reminder that all human truths are contingent constructs, and thus subject to revision upon careful scrutiny. Unfortunately, this stance sometimes proceeds to the point of an unexamined, unyielding form of skepticism. It seems to me that people (and I think I see a few out there) need reminders of what Lewalski perhaps fondly calls "human possibility" more and more. To old-fashioned humanists like Lewalski and me, the ways we are meaningfully alike, and possibly connected, and possibly of help to one another, matter more than warnings about the artificiality of such claims. Suffice it here to say that Lewalski's belief in a universal humanistic criticism has its detractors.

So, we move to the third respondent as to "why Milton matters," Joseph Wittreich. Focusing on Milton's tragedy, Samson Agonistes, Wittreich unabashedly claimed that a critic's own cultural and temporal situation is vital to any meaningful claims he or she might make for Milton's significance. From the perspective of a New Yorker living in the shadow of 9/11, Wittreich insists, Milton's Samson can no longer be what earlier critics have claimed, "a Biblical hero of faith" reborn in the creative ferment of Milton's revolutionary England. For Wittreich, Milton's Samson, who pulled down the temple roof on the lords and priests among the Philistines, must be seen as a radically ambiguous, even disturbing figure. At times, Wittreich says, this Samson seems inseparable from the terrorists who destroyed the twin towers on 9/11. Yet elsewhere in Milton's poem, Wittreich admits, Samson speaks as a voice of reason yoked to spiritual discipline, an intellectual yet deeply religious agonist. [The Greek word agon sounds close to "agony"; it actually is closer to a contest; so Samson is somewhere between being in agony and being a contestant] For Wittreich, Milton's continuing power as a writer resides in his power to compose such ultimately undecidable, double-edged figures. This ambiguity is salutary, Wittreich believes, as Milton resists all too easy labeling of human agents and literary characters made in their image as simply good or evil, inspired or insane, brutal or heroic.

Time now for my answer, beginning with the theme of "discriminating freedom." Let us stay with Milton's Samson, the central figure in Samson Agonistes, a work that is at once Greek tragedy, Hebraic narrative, and Reformation manifesto. In this, the last of Milton's poems, I see the end of the poet's lifelong struggle to depict and celebrate personal liberty. The character Samson that Milton creates in the play is far from the strongman smiting with the jawbone of an ass we may recall from the Book of Judges. At the beginning of Milton's tragedy, we meet Samson at the apparent nadir of his career. A prisoner of the Philistines, his eyes put out, Samson reflects on his life story while his captors celebrate a holiday. As he rests, Samson ponders the apparently failed prophecy by an angel that he "should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver." That prophecy strikes him now as a mockery, calling forth his own self-pity: "Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves, / Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke." When his father arrives to comfort him, with news of his plan to liberate Samson from prison, Samson at first demurs: better to accept his failure and take his punishment, he snaps.

Yet in the next breath, Samson arrives at a liberating insight. His present constraints are not so absolute as they seemed a moment ago. When he swaggered and lived at large among the Philistines, in his lust for women and his pride in his physical strength, Samson imagined that he was free. Now he sees that his former, imagined freedom was a kind of slavery to image and desire. Hence, by comparison, his current state is not "true slavery" after all (This is the first quotation on the handout):

The base degree to which I now am fall'n,
These rags, this grinding, is not yet so base
As was my former servitude, ignoble,
Unmanly, ignominious, infamous,
True slavery, and that blindness worse than this,
That saw not how degenerately I served.
(Samson, in Samson Agonistes, 413-19)

A Minnesota poet, Bob Dylan, wrote in a popular song lyric of the 70s, that "you're gonna have to serve somebody." Samson begins to wonder how he could have served so "degenerately," and who it is he has been serving. His master, he concludes, has been his own bloated ego and appetite. Upon re-reading these lines in light of a recent New Yorker magazine article, I momentarily confused the speaker with former president Bill Clinton. A version of these lines may have run through the mind of the President Clinton who in former days lusted after cheeseburgers and interns in D.C., but who now in his retirement, according to the article, spent this past summer eating roasted vegetables in Ethiopia, while vigorously pursuing treatment for AIDS with medical professionals and leaders such as Nelson Mandela. Any of us, awakening from the dream of a former ignoble pursuit, may say with Samson: "I saw not how degenerately I served." It is a long way from this realization on Samson's part to a full, active freedom, either for himself or for his people, but certainly the beginning of the process is here. Perhaps most important, the mental and moral awareness that enables forward motion, is here as well. Samson now begins to understand that his life story remains to be written, and that understanding makes possible what he will do in his final hour. Thus, Milton's Samson is a complex, intellectually challenging, even metamorphic figure, but he is not the inscrutable, uncertain puzzle or anamorph Wittreich posits. To me, he represents a human being who employs all the resources at his disposal to ascertain how to employ the gift of liberty. In my view, this is not confusion but the intricate calculus of conscience.

It happens that the first essay of mine on Milton to be published, back in 1984, focused on a satiric sonnet that the poet wrote, apparently in frustration that English readers had mocked and largely rejected his four tracts arguing for divorce on grounds of incompatibility. The sonnet (Selection I.B. on the handout) has the unintentionally humorous opening line: "I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs"; the Puritans have never received high fashion marks for their footwear. The point of the sonnet, however, is a key distinction between genuine and apparent liberty that anticipates the liberating distinction I have been claiming on Samson's part. As an artist in the European Renaissance, as a Christian humanist, Milton looks back to the ancients for inspiration, both to Greek and Roman thinkers and to Hebraic and Christian writers such as Moses and St. Augustine. The way to "ancient liberty," the sonnet explains, is by established "rules"; moreover, those rules are widely "known." The concept of Rules for Liberty may be a stumbling block for Americans, eager as we are to do our own thing and feel good about it. If you truly love liberty, the sonnet claims, you will first be "wise and good." Otherwise, it's not liberty you are pursuing but "license." What's nice about this word "license" is that it punningly superimposes two evils that Milton repeatedly opposed: the evil of "licentiousness," basically a willing disregard for moral reflection; and the evil of "licensing," which was the State apparatus in place in English law at the time, whereby ideas deemed objectionable were restricted, in keeping with Parliament's Licensing Act of 1636. In Milton's day, both dangers were rampant. On the one hand he faced Libertines, like the Earl of Rochester, who promoted a sophisticated version of sexual hedonism under the banner of liberty; On the other he faced Licensers, led by Archbishop William Laud, the head of the English Church, who burned and sponged away books deemed offensive to the establishment by several authors—including Roger Williams of Rhode Island as well as John Milton. Both Libertines and Licencers keep us from true liberty, Milton warns, and both retard true reformation. By the way, Milton always spoke of the Reformation as not completed in the past with Luther and Calvin but to be realized in the coming Reformation that he foresaw in England's future. For an example, look to the excerpt from the speech, Areopagitica, item I.C. on the handout. There, in his defense of unlicensed printing, or liberty of the press, Milton magnificently imagines London as the "mansion house of liberty," with her metal workers and citizen soldiers—for this is 1644, two years into the English Civil War—outdone only by her poets' ","pens and heads" laboring to prepare the nation for the "approaching Reformation."

Let me hasten to my second theme, "the rhetoric of heroism," which finds its fullest expression in Milton's epic, Paradise Lost. Milton saw the epic as not merely a long narrative poem like those of Homer and Vergil, but a life-changing encounter capable of effecting a kind of inner transformation in readers. When Milton speculated in his 30s about the kind of literary legacy he hoped to leave future generations, he described it almost as a child to be nurtured by its midwives, its future readers. Through labor and intent study, Milton hoped, as he put it, that "I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die."

Milton's vision of composing a lasting epic was long deferred. When Paradise Lost did appear in 1667, England has witnessed the complete collapse of the Puritan revolution and most of Milton's personal hopes as well. Along with political failure, Milton had suffered the complete loss of his eyesight; by his mid-40s, he had become completely blind. His wife, Mary Powell, had died in childbirth. Given the losses in his personal life and political career, Milton brooded on loss in choosing an epic subject, and settled on the Biblical story of the loss of Eden. No personal lament for Cromwell, his party, or the Good Old Cause appears in the epic; instead, the epic's tone is searching, expansive, yet still hopeful. Milton directly mentions his blindness, but finds in that loss a path to spiritual vision. The blind poet begs Celestial Light to "Shine inward, there plant eyes, that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight" (3.51-55).

The voice that dominates the poem at the start, however, is not that of Milton, or Adam and Eve, or even God, but the rebel angel, Satan. Satan will be our first witness for "the rhetoric of heroism." In the opening scene of the epic, Satan sees Beelzebub, his lieutenant in the campaign against the forces of Heaven, and Satan immediately registers his sense of his comrade's degeneration. (Look to passage numbered II.A.) So changed is Beelzebub from the bright presence Satan remembers that he does a double take, barely recognizing in the face he sees the angel Satan knew in Heaven:

If thou beest he; But O how fall'n! how chang'd
From him, who in the happy Realms of Light
Cloth'd with transcendent brightness didst outshine
Myriads though bright. (1.84-87)

Two survivors of battle on a darkling plain, Satan and the changed Beelzebub evoke our pity. Not content to be merely a victim of war—for as he later insists, "to be weak is miserable, doing or suffering"—Satan assumes the active role of revisionary historian. In his next words to his comrade, he begins the political work of re-spinning his ill-conceived rebellion:

If he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope,
And hazard in the Glorious Enterprise,
Join'd with me once, now misery hath join'd
In equal ruin: into what Pit thou seest
From what highth fallen, so much the stronger prov'd
He with his Thunder: and till then who knew
The force of those dire Arms? (1.87-94).

Satan has landed his fellows in Hell: this he re-styles "the Glorious Enterprise." His Creator, the Messiah, whose name he refuses to utter, is re-cast, in perfect deadpan, as "He with his Thunder." Finally, Satan turns his own ignorance ("who knew") into a conviction of God for entrapment, for concealing his strength to sucker the devils into fatal rebellion. Satan is the Prince of Doublespeak. Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld are choirboys by comparison.

The beauty of Milton's handling of the performance is that we see through, even as we admire, Satan's verbal pyrotechnics. If we wish, we may continue to applaud Satan's rhetoric even as we judge his morality corrupt. (Turn the handout over for the rest of Passage II.A.) With this rhetorical move, the last I will trace, Satan completely casts off the mantle of the defeated and styles himself in heroic proportions, the perpetual antagonist of Heaven. Satan refuses to take his defeat in the war against heaven as final:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
(Satan, in Paradise Lost [1667] 1.105-109)

Over the years, I have had many readers tell me that they admire Satan. He seems to make the most of a bad situation; or to endure stoically, or to be prepared, in the words of Harold Bloom, who celebrates Milton's character, to "rally everything that remains." I do not wish to deny these readings, full of sympathy for the devil, which I take to be sincere. I do, however, find them incomplete. Satan the perpetual warrior admits to being fueled by hate, by revenge that will only tend toward destruction. Satan may convey the impression that he brings an unbending will, yet closer inspection shows that he is, in the narrator's apt description, "Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair." So-called Romantic or Satanic readers feel that the Devil's sense of "injured merit" is justified because the universe is ordered against his individual will, and there is a kind of sacredness to that self in an impersonal, if not unfair moral universe. Poets from Alexander Pope to William Empson have preferred Satan's personality to that of Milton's God. Yet many readers counter that Satan's speeches always end up revealing his selfishness in a negative way, his motives and results ever more corrosive. Let me not try to cut this Gordian knot. Perhaps the most important point I can make about Satan's speech is that, however one reads it, Milton's poetry leads readers to enact their own process of moral discrimination. Choose Satan, or choose God, Milton urges, but above all choose.

Fortunately, Satan's rhetoric is not the only, or the final, model of heroism presented in Paradise Lost. That distinction falls to Eve. Let me turn to Book 10, the book I am responsible for in the Milton Variorum Project. There we find Adam and Eve after the Fall, separate and embittered. Adam, guilt-ridden, indulges in depths of self pity that exceed those of Job, and challenges his Creator in a notorious rhetorical question:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me? (10.743-45)

Readers of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein will recognize these lines as the epigraph to her dark, brooding novel about the woeful process of human creativity, particularly the irresponsible and monstrous making of Victor Frankenstein. In Milton's narrative, however, Adam soon accepts the terms under which he was created, and moreover accepts his own responsibility for sin. While absolving his Maker of blame, Adam, in fact, assumes too much responsibility for sin, ending his lament in these words:

All my evasions vain . . . lead me still
But to my own conviction: first and last
On mee, mee only, as the source and spring
Of all corruption, all the blame lights due;
So might the wrath. (10.829-34)

While Adam's sense of conviction is theologically necessary, his selfishness reflects Satan's worldview. In a lesser writer's hands, the story of the Fall might have ended here, with Satan victorious in isolating and destroying the human community, had not Milton seen the need for Eve to intervene. Though previously rejected by Adam, Eve humbles herself, weeps kneeling at Adam's feet, and proposes that she and Adam unite to oppose Satan. (Eve's speech is passage II.B on the handout). Her plea begins with a sense of urgency, for she knows that she and Adam are now, for the first time, subject to death:

Forsake me not thus, Adam, witness Heav'n
What love sincere, and reverence in my heart
I bear thee, and unweeting have offended. . .
While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps,
Between us two let there be peace, both joining,
As join'd in injuries, one enmity
Against a Foe by doom express assign'd us,
That cruel Serpent: On me exercise not
Thy hatred for this misery befall'n,
On me already lost, mee than thyself
More miserable. (10.924-30)

In the epic tradition, Eve's plea and posture are those of supplication, her role that of a suppliant. Homer's Iliad ends with a similar, emotionally powerful scene, in which Priam, the King of Troy, falls before the feet of Achilles, and begs him for the body of his son, whom Achilles has slain. Like Priam, Eve wins her suit. Adam reaches out to her in commiseration, and his heart relents toward her. With this change in Adam and Eve's relationship, the corruption of Sin begins to be reversed, and Eve and Adam go on from this point to begin repairing the ruins of the Fall. It is no accident that Eve's heroic rhetoric not only recalls Homer, but also echoes the voice of the Son of God, heard earlier in Milton's epic. In Milton's epic, Eve is the best human exemplar of the heavenly heroism embodied by the Son, whom God the Father praises for his "exalt[ing] Humiliation, " and "because in thee / Love hath abounded more than Glory abounds" (3.311-14). In my book, Milton and Ovid, I describe this form of heroism as "counter-heroism," so striking is its opposition to the martial heroism celebrated by the pagan, epic tradition.

Theme three: searching for wisdom and beauty. In Milton's speech, Areopagitica, he urges readers to "apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish," that which is truly better. If this process sounds comfortable, think again: apprehending evil is bound to be desolate, even desperate, and possibly corrupting. But failure to contemplate evil produces only in a "blank virtue not a pure," as Milton put it. Avoid the trial and you avoid virtue itself: "What wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil?" Confident that wisdom may be found but alerting us that finding it requires mental agility and dauntless courage, Milton uses all the resources of language to lead us to pursue it.

As a young writer, Milton lighted on a pagan myth that he turned to repeatedly to represent the process of searching for, and partially recovering, our losses. It's a striking story, for it mingles the joy of recovery with the painful labor involved in the search. As the Roman poet Ovid tells the story in his epic, the Metamorphoses, Dis, the king of the underworld, seized the young goddess Proserpina, and when she was taken, Earth lost our former perpetual spring. Her mother, Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, sought her child everywhere, and finally descended to Hell to find her, but was only allowed to bring her back briefly. Milton wove this story of loss and pursuit into an unforgettable description of Eden in Paradise Lost. (See passage III.A.) Even the perfect, pre-fallen paradise of Enna in Sicily, where Proserpina wandered, cannot compare with Eden, Milton writes:

Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs
Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis
Was gather'd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world. . . might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive. (4.268-75)

Eden, that biblical reality, makes pagan paradises pale by comparison. My favorite Miltonic reworking of this pagan myth, however, appears in a Latin letter Milton wrote to his best friend, Charles Diodati. (My translation of this passage is the last one on your sheet) In the letter to Diodati, Ceres's search, her relentless, passionate pursuit, is outdone yet once more, this time by Milton's own striving for the idea of the beautiful. This time, the search Milton describes ends not in loss but in valuing one's fellow searchers:

Not so diligently is Ceres, according to the Fables, said to have sought her daughter Proserpina, as I seek for this idea of the beautiful, as if for some glorious image, throughout all the shapes and forms of things—"for many are the shapes of things divine"—day and night I search and follow its lead eagerly as if by certain clear traces. Whence it happens that if I find anywhere one who, despising the warped judgment of the public, dares to feel and speak and be that which the greatest wisdom throughout all ages has taught to be best, I shall cling to him immediately from a kind of necessity.
(Letter to Charles Diodati, 1637)

The quest Milton describes here is "personal" in both senses. It is an individual's quest, with the searcher disdaining popular judgment in searching for the shapes of things divine. Second, it leads such searchers to connect with other individuals who embody wisdom, who "feel and speak and are" wisdom. Only a searcher as desperate and relentless as Ceres, or as inspired, would bother. That may help explain why I cling to this searcher, John Milton, as he clung to his true friend. Following Milton's metaphors, as I have done and hope to continue doing, may help you see why Milton matters to me, and perhaps to others in this "fit audience."