Volume 6, Number 10 · June 9, 1966
In Defense of Milton
By Christopher Ricks
John Milton
by Douglas Bush
Macmillan, 224 pp., $3.95
The Return of Eden
by Northrop Frye
University of Toronto, 143 pp., $4.95
Milton's Brief Epic
by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski
Brown University, 436 pp., $6.50
'The literati,' says Douglas Bush with something of a tremor, 'have not for decades granted Milton a place in the canon of poets who minister to our needs.' An overstatement, of course—Miltonists like Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, C. S. Lewis, and Northrop Frye are scarcely illiterati. But it brings out that Milton has (all along) been the most controversial poet in English. Of all the needs to which he ministers, the greatest is our need to commit ourselves in passionate argument about literature. Not as part of the academic industry, but because literature is the supreme controversy concerning 'the best that has been thought and said in the world.' By the energy and sincerity of his poetry, Milton stands—as no other poet quite does—in heartening and necessary opposition to all aestheticisms, old and new.
Review, 1949 words
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