The Miltonic Future

The business of our Association is with Research in all the modern languages and literatures from today backwards as far as the first linguistic data about any of them are accessible. We are concerned with the past and not with any waves of the future. Our disciplines and courses as I overheard a student on the dark campus of the University of Wisconsin sigh to a group who happened to be passing me on Bascom Hill a few months ago are tied to the past though many of them are officially described as 'contemporary'. 'Literature', he said, 'is as much tied to the past as history.' I would not dispute his thesis, though I am quite ready to agree with those historians who regard their subject as a science exact enough to make some kinds of prediction possible. Of course, we too have our historical disciplines the languages, the historical aspects of aesthetics, and the common ground which we share with historians of ideas. All these have contributed to what we know about Milton and to our multilateral curiosity about him, upon which the Miltonic future largely depends. If for a short future of a few years I predict a persisting excitement over some of our frustrated curiosities about Milton and his major poems, I hope that I shall not be accused of forgetting that literary history and criticism are not exact sciences, or reproached because our best biographical work has failed to assure us of anything like definite dates for the years when Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes were written. In his magnificent edition of Paradise Lost1 Alastair Fowler says that we know nothing more about the time of its composition than is to be gathered from Thomas Elwood's report of having seen the finished manuscript in 1665, and from the concurrence of the early biographers, Edward Phillips and John Aubrey, about Milton's way of writing at night or early dawn in impulsive runs of sometimes as many as twenty to forty lines, mainly through the winters of I658 to 1663. We are still less secure about our attempts to date the other two major poems. Among the many questions about Milton's life to which we still have no sure answers W. R. Parker's Biography2 lists the mysteries of the dates of their composition and of the lapses of time between those dates and that of their publication in 167 . For Samson Parker was most attracted by I647 'as the time when Milton wrote a moving drama