Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

generic. Their shared disdain may owe less to Milton’s artistic fraudulence than to the not uncommon tendency of lesser artists to mitigate the achievements of greater ones. Rymer is more easily cleared from that suspicion. True to his name, he scorned unrhymed narrative verse as prose, an arbitrary genre distinction but one general at the time as the note on verse affixed to the first edition attests. By contrast, Eliot’s dedication to the proposition that genre is an ersatz proxy for true poetry remains a head-scratcher, even in its historical context.
    According to the
OED
, the term
genre
did not enter English usage until the nineteenth century. The concept of literary kind had by then already been debated for millennia, however, energetically so during the European Renaissance, when genre was held in very high esteem, not least by Milton himself. His ideal curriculum includes prosody as a necessary technical study, but far above it in real dignity he places the “sublime art” that teaches “the laws” governing “true” poems, whether epic, dramatic, or lyric (
Of Ed
in
MLM
977–78). The reverential diction is telling. Taken together with the related claim that Scripture offers the most perfect instances of the major genres (
RCG
in
MLM
841), it suggests that for Milton, as for Sir Philip Sidney before him, literary genres were divinely authorized modes of mimesis, corresponding to the Creator’s arrangement of reality. Compared with any individual poem, genre was the more real thing, and indeed “the first thing the reader needs to know about
Paradise Lost,
” according to C. S. Lewis (1).
    Eliot’s low regard for genre may have stemmed from discomfortwith prescriptive rules for poetry. Milton does insist on “laws” for poems, after all. But his neoclassicism is distinct from the neoclassicism that prevailed in England after the Restoration, Rymer being one of its chief proponents. Through the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century, Italy was the center of cultural authority in Europe. Its cities “swarmed with critics,” according to Rymer, but as “swarmed” suggests, the Italian critical hegemony lacked uniformity or a common national focus. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the individualism of the Italian swarm gradually gave way to the regimentation of the French. “From Italy, France took the cudgels,” the pugnacious Rymer put it, tracing French ascendancy to Cardinal Richelieu’s amalgamation of cultural with political authority at the increasingly absolutist French court (1694, A2r–v). Milton, however, never acknowledged the cultural turn away from his beloved Italy. His ambitions as an epic poet crystallized during his visit to Italy (1638–39), and his disdain for France was quite general and persistent. His masterworks of the Restoration display a sublime if studied indifference to Gallic dictates, and his conception of literary genre, epic specifically, owes a great deal to the formative influence of sixteenth-century Italians, Torquato Tasso most prominently.
    Milton refers to Tasso repeatedly in poems composed during his visit to Italy (see, e.g.,
Manso
), and when in
The Reason of Church Government
he discusses epic, Tasso alone is named in the company of Homer and Vergil (
MLM
840–41). It was Tasso who originally argued that the “laws of poetry” are divinely established realities, “essential and fixed by the very nature and law of things” (Kates 36). A poet did not need to conform to fixed rules derived from authoritative precedent but could instead embody the objectively based laws of poetry according to the judgment of natural reason, judgment informed not only by subjective experience and the efforts of precursors but also by, most crucially for a Christian poet, scriptural revelation. Milton may have adored Homer above all other poets, but to fulfill his own poetic vocation in the genre that Homer epitomized, Milton characteristically