Milton’s Epic

The literary taste of any age is influenced by its style and quality of book production. One recalls vividly how different Burns’s Collected Poems seem when dominated by the Gothic shades of a nineteenth-century illustrator; or how much more clipped and hygienic James Hogg appears in large clear type with an Introduction by André Gide. So in this edition of Milton’s poetry the compact and careful typography and the craftsmanship for which the Oxford University Press is justly famed enable one to read Milton with new eyes.

Helen Darbishire, according to several informed critics, has produced an edition of Milton which is more in accord with Milton’s original intention than any other. Her meticulous and scholarly observation of every variation in spelling and punctuation is unquestionably a labour to be admired; but her textual commentary makes it plain that her scholarship has been illuminated by insight. Paradise Lost, to which T.S. Eliot once referred as a Chinese wall built across the road of English literature, emerges in all its lights and shades. But apart from those undeniably great passages which are scattered through this work, the section which relates to the fall of the Angels and the character of Satan, and the lyrical description of Adam and Eve unfallen alone have full dramatic force. One is overwhelmed by Milton, yet often I am dissatisfied. His earth and hell are real enough; his heaven is a somewhat draughty room.

1953 (74)