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Milton Turned Upside Down

Suppose that 300 years hence a diligent intellectual historian sets out to investigate the politics of a humane and liberal poet-Robert Lowell, let us say-placing his views squarely in the context of the intellectually tumultuous 1960s. Our hypothetical historian might, with rigorous exactitude, inform us that Lowell's position on civil rights was somewhat to the left of the NAACP but less militant than that of SNCC; that in the antiwar movement his beliefs corresponded to those of SDS; but, while he repudiated violence, he could not repress an admiration for the commitment of the Weathermen; he signed petitions supporting the Black Panthers; and on the issue of ecology he was more extreme than the Sierra Club. While all of the examples (which I have invented) may be true individually, the persistent terms of comparison would create a false picture, projecting the image of a man in conscious dialogue with organizations and special interest groups when in fact his beliefs both would have been founded earlier and evolved much more individually. This is precisely the difficulty with Christopher Hill's Milton and the English Revolution. I However impressive the accumulation of individual bits of stone, together he has used them to create a mosaic that presents an optical illusion. Hill's thesis here will come as no surprise to readers of The World Turned Upside Down (New York, 1972). Simply stated, the argument is that "Milton's ideas were more directly influenced than is usually recognized" by the English Revolution. These influences were "much more radical" than has been understood, and Milton's ideas came not from reading but from direct contact with the orally transmitted "radical underground." "I see him in permanent dialogue with the plebeian radical thinkers of the English Revolution" (p. 5). And, finally, the major poems directly reflect these radical ideas: "All three poems are deeply political, wrestling with the problem of the failed revolution, the millennium that did not come" (p. 362). Essentially, then, the terrain of the present book is the upside-down world of lower-class radicalism as traversed by a singular wayfaring and warfaring pilgrim, John Milton. Throughout, Hill scrupulously resists the impulse to identify Milton's ideas completely with those of his cherished radicals. Rather, the thesis is that Milton "moved uneasily between the second and third cultures" (p. 77), "assimilating, chewing over, selecting and rejecting from this new world of radical theory, which at once attracted and repelled him" (p. 161). But while Hill is at pains to assure us that "I do not think Milton was a Leveller, a Ranter, a Muggletonian or a Behmenist" (p. 113), in the sweep of the argument such disclaimers tend to get lost, because of the presumption that similarity means identity: "I tried once to list those sects and