Mute Inglorious Milton

Oxymoron of Personality

I remember the teacher introducing us to Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard way back in high school: junior high, could have been grade school. I feel confident that I was introduced to some of its famous images before I ever knew any Milton at all: even so much as who Milton is supposed to have been. Some of its burry images adhered in my mind, but of course aLL of those phrases had long before woven themselves into the very language: far from the madding crowd … mute inglorious Milton …

Country Churchyard

Eve’s ability to attract Adam (and to keep him attracted) got woven into our genes, the female is born ready to “know” that. You and I are born ready to process language, recognize grammar, assimilate metaphor … That’s in the human genome. Specific phrases are perishable: even “a plague on both your houses,” “twas brillig and the slithy toves” … even “Thou shalt not kill.” Hamlet will be lost before knowledge about how to grow eyes that are blue. Meanwhile, Shakespeare is in the language, deep in the language. Already, so are Cole Porter and the Beatles.

Sometime after that public school event, way on in college I did learn something about Milton, and Bunyan too, and way on in graduate school, learning more about Milton, something occurred to me about Thomas Gray’s Milton image that I’ve been meaning to say out loud, publicly. It’s about time I got around to some version of it. And that is:

Milton’s publicness, his fame, his existence near the core of government, cannot be subtracted from who Milton is and still leave Milton remaining. In other words, “mute inglorious Milton” is an oxymoron: a contradiction.
Now, there are profound oxymora: “reasonable man.” That’s a paradox without which “man” is not rightly appreciated. “Fair trial,” public library” … A complex species, semi-sentient, doesn’t fit onto one map where the map is mapped in human language. Poets need oxymoron to span the complexities, to hint at multi-dimensionality …

John Milton

I’ll say that better next draft: meantime: “mute inglorious Milton” is a great phrase but its paradoxical essence doesn’t really bear up.

The same is true of the image that follows: “some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.” Cromwell spent much of his adulthood living in simple anonymity: but that “Cromwell” has no public meaning. The man can’t be subtracted from his future history. That cat can’t go back in the bag.

Lillian Gish was famous for being pretty (and a damn good actress). God, at Judgment, could perhaps (he does seem to enjoy time wasting) show us ten thousand girls with features just as symmetrical. Maybe if we beat the bushes (as Hollywood does in fact do), we’d find another dozen boys just as jaw-droppingly boyish as Brad Pitt. Maybe Heaven’s library has a dozen unpublished plays just as brilliant as Hamlet … Maybe a dozen presidents gave speeches as rhetorically structured as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; but they weren’t addressed at Gettysburg! There’s no telling how many other men in America in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s were just as shadowy, just as hypocritical as Richard Nixon, but only one of them was the Watergate President: that toxicity is unique.

Paraphrase:

Yes, some dead peasant in the graveyard could have had extraordinary linguistic capacity, but unless he wrote Paradise Lost, saw it become famous, and was a powerful pamphleteer, a pillar of Cromwell’s government, he wasn’t Milton. The acorn that doesn’t grow to an oak that dominates its section of forest may have been just a good an acorn, but it isn’t just as good an oak.

I offered an internet far better than this one, forty-two years ago. But mine isn’t the internet you have. And the truth isn’t the history that you’re taught.

There could have been a million men in the existence of the cosmos who were every bit as numinous as Jesus, just as good, just as divine … There could have been five hundred Jews crucified by Romans in Jerusalem all named Jesus. But only one of them was crucified in Jerusalem two thousand years ago where the Temple got its cheap shots in first. That Jesus cannot be subtracted from the more generic Jesuses and remain our Jesus.

PS Glancing through Gray’s Elegy this morning for the first time in decades in occurs to me: I may never have read this poem carefully, in its entirety. And though I’ve read a lot of Milton, I sure haven’t read all of Milton. And Bunyan, once the second most popular piece of writing in English after the King James Bible, right behind Paradise Lost, there sure is a lot of Milton I have never yet read once: and never will in all likelihood.