How Milton Works

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by Stanley Fish

Harvard University Press

Due/Published May 2001, 544 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674004655

Fish's lifelong engagement begun with John Milton that began with his Surprised by Sin, culminates in this book.

How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern here, with Fish exploring the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value.

Review

"There is, then, a double game going on in [Milton's] poetry and the prose, but it is a doubleness impelled by the desire for its own erasure."

Stanley Fish returns to John Milton in this assured and illuminating study his theological beliefs and how it shapes his poetry. Fish counters those critics of Milton who celebrate the duality and ambivalence in his writing, arguing that these are, in fact, the qualities the poet would most despise. This misreading of Milton, Fish argues, which began with the Romantics, ignores the poet's staunch commitment to divine truth. Fish admits that Milton's work is full of open-endedness, tragedy and other admirable aesthetic qualities but insists that they are there for instruction: the reader must resist. for example, the temptations of plot, narrative, representation or anything that might distract from the word of God.

As Stephen Greenblatt's review puts it, "How Milton Works is a dazzling, rigorous, and unutterably strange attempt to follow the great seventeenth-century poet along the perilous path that leads away from the temptations of history and politics and into the fair fields of eternal Truth. Why strange? Because the book depends upon a perfect congruence between the fathomless faith of John Milton and the fathomless skepticism of Stanley Fish."

Also recently from Stanley Fish is The Trouble With Principle. Now in Paper!