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Fancy, Faith, and Generative Mimesis in Paradise Lost

Fancy, Faith, and Generative Mimesis in Paradise Lost LESLIEKNEDLIK We a r e told that Milton distrusted the fancy. In 1976 Boyd M. Berry situated Paradise Lost within the matrix of Puritan religious writings: Milton exhibited a Calvinism hostile to all fictive language.2 In 1983John Guillory interpreted Milton within the powerful Bloomian fable of precursor anxiety. Guillory’s Milton rejected the fancy even more intensely than did the Calvinist Milton, identifying the poetry of fancy with the secular Shakespeare. Milton displaced his threatening progenitor by reenacting instead Spenser’s archaizing impulse of invoking divine inspiration to authorize a truly sacred poetry. For Milton, the Shakespearean imagination was the “self-begetting” herald of human autonomy; in fact, a secular imagination was the inevitable harbinger of historical crisis in a universe losing its conviction of Presence.3 Behind such readings lies the issue of Milton’s religious enthusiasm, as a boldly speculative postmodern Milton emerges, quirky I Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 32-33; my italics. Process o Speech: Puritan Religious Writing and “Paradise Lost” (Baltimore: John Hopkins f University Press, 1976). Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Guillory frequently cites William Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History Duke University Press

Fancy, Faith, and Generative Mimesis in Paradise Lost

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1986 by University of Washington
ISSN
0026-7929
eISSN
1527-1943
DOI
10.1215/00267929-47-1-19
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

LESLIEKNEDLIK We a r e told that Milton distrusted the fancy. In 1976 Boyd M. Berry situated Paradise Lost within the matrix of Puritan religious writings: Milton exhibited a Calvinism hostile to all fictive language.2 In 1983John Guillory interpreted Milton within the powerful Bloomian fable of precursor anxiety. Guillory’s Milton rejected the fancy even more intensely than did the Calvinist Milton, identifying the poetry of fancy with the secular Shakespeare. Milton displaced his threatening progenitor by reenacting instead Spenser’s archaizing impulse of invoking divine inspiration to authorize a truly sacred poetry. For Milton, the Shakespearean imagination was the “self-begetting” herald of human autonomy; in fact, a secular imagination was the inevitable harbinger of historical crisis in a universe losing its conviction of Presence.3 Behind such readings lies the issue of Milton’s religious enthusiasm, as a boldly speculative postmodern Milton emerges, quirky I Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 32-33; my italics. Process o Speech: Puritan Religious Writing and “Paradise Lost” (Baltimore: John Hopkins f University Press, 1976). Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Guillory frequently cites William Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton

Journal

Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 1986

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