The Poetics of John Milton

Part 1 - on Plato and Aristotle

[The following series of posts on John Milton, that some good friends have been urging me to do for awhile now, are my humble attempt to show a few happy glimpses into the wonderful mind of one of the fathers of our present-day English language, and even though Milton would lose his eyesight, he would re-focus his mind so that - “I may see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight”.]

John Milton (1608 - 1674) who was to become a poet, a schoolteacher, a pamphleteer, and the foreign secretary of the English Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, was born on December 9th 1608. He grew up at his father’s house on Bread Street near St. Paul’s Cathedral in the city of London. And nearby on that same Bread Street, one could also find the Mermaid Tavern!

The Mermaid Tavern was frequented by some of England’s most famous playwrights – like Ben Jonson, John Donne, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, and, as some stories say, by William Shakespeare (a.k.a. Christopher Marlowe).

One can only wonder, if perhaps as a young boy, John Milton may have seen and heard these playwrights, as they passed him by, on their way to that Mermaid Tavern, and perhaps, he may have remembered them, as John Keats had thought of them, in his poem - ‘Lines on the Mermaid Tavern’:

“Souls of Poets dead and gone,

What Elysium have ye known,

Happy field or mossy cavern,

Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? …”

Milton’s grandfather (Richard) had been a ‘stubborn Catholic recalcitrant under Elizabeth’, but his father (John Sr.) however broke with his father and became a Puritan, and he moved to London, where he worked as a scrivener. But his father also was a composer of church music, who taught music to his children, and here, the young John (Jr.) learned to play the small organ and the bas-viol.

Milton received private tutoring until the age of twelve, when he would attend St. Paul’s School until the age of sixteen, when he would attend Christ’s College at Cambridge University, where studied to be a minister. After 4 years, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and after 3 more years, with a Master of Arts degree, but by then he had decided not to enter the priesthood, instead preferring to see his future as a poet, perhaps.

With further studies after Milton left Cambridge, his education would give him the ability to compose prose in French, Spanish, German and Dutch, and the ability to read Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic and Old English.

I remember Lyndon LaRouche once said that a true nation is organized around a common, literate language. But also, he said, that when learning a language, one learns how to think in that language, and that learning another language, teaches us a different way of thinking. And that, although we become a citizen of one nation with one common language, by learning other languages we can only improve our way of thinking, and of our understanding of the rest of our human family; and of how our culture is viewed by other cultures.

Perhaps, this could be a lesson for parents today, that instead of immersing our children ONLY in mathematics, algebra, algorithms and computer studies, we should remember that many great geniuses studied art, music and languages. And I guess one could say that music is a language too. As Mary Shelley said:

“… Music [is] the language of the Immortals, disclosed to us as testimony of their existence.”

While Milton was studying Latin and Greek at Cambridge, he learned about Homer, and Pythagoras, and Plato and Aristotle.

In one of his ‘Latin Poems’ - ‘On the Platonic Idea as it was Understood by Aristotle’, Milton skillfully and humorously shows his understanding of the differences between Plato and Aristotle:

“This is probably also an academic exercise … It is an attempt to burlesque Aristotle’s interpretation, too rigid and physical, of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas or Archetypes. Milton speaks not in his own person, but in the person of a literal-minded Aristotelian, who demands loudly to know where the Archetype of man can be found, in the heavens above or the earth beneath. The manner of refutation here adopted is unexpectedly genial and humorous.”

[from the Latin to English translation by William Vaughn Moody]

It is said that Milton wrote this in 1629, at 20-years-of-age!!!

John Milton at age 20.

‘On the Platonic Idea as it was Understood by Aristotle’

Ye goddesses who guard the sacred grove,

and thou, O Memory, happy mother of the nine-fold deity;

and Eternity, lazily recumbent far off in thy great cavern,

guarding the laws and ordinance of Jove

and keeping the chronicles of feast-calendars of Heaven,

Tell me, who was that first being,

Eternal, incorruptible, coeval with the sky,

that one and universal being, exemplar of God,

after whose image cunning nature patterned humankind ?

It surely does not lurk unborn in the brain of Jove, a twin to virgin Pallas.

Though its nature is common to many, yet, wonderful to tell,

it exists apart after the manner of an individual, and has a local habitation.

Perchance as comrade to the sempiternal stars

it wanders through the ten spheres of heaven,

and inhabits the globe of the moon, nearest the earth.

Perchance it sits drowsing by the oblivious waters of Lethe,

among the spirits that wait to enter some living body and be born.

Or in some remote region of the world

does this archetype of man walk about as a huge giant,

lifting its high head to frighten the gods,

taller than Atlas the star-bearer ?

No, the seer Tiresias, to whom blindness gave but added depth of vision,

never saw it in his dreams.

Winged Mercury never showed it to the wise band of seers,

as he taught them in the silent night.

The Assyrian priest, though he knew the long ancestry of ancient Ninus,

knew old Belus and renowned Osiris,

never heard of such a creature.

Not even Hermes Trismegistus, trine and glorious name,

though he knew many secret things,

told aught of this to the worshipers of Isis.

Ah, Plato, unfading glory of the Academe,

If you were the first to bring such monsters as this into the schools,

you really ought to call back the poets

whom you exiled from your republic,

for you are the greatest fabler of them all.

Bring them in, or else you,

the founder, must go out !

[next week - part 2 - on the Scholastics]