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In an article for the London Review of Books Colin Burrow looks to works by the 17th Century English poet, John Milton, to address the one key question which he says has not yet been answered: “How is it possible to like Milton?”

Burrow says that “Most people would think of him as an overlearned poet who combines labyrinthine syntax with a wide range of moral and intellectual vices.” Starting out with Milton’s views on women Burrow turns to “Paradise Lost”: “Milton’s most dislikeable line – ‘Hee for God only, shee for God in him’ – suggests that Eve spent all day gazing at Adam for shadows of reflected divinity” and finds that “it is not difficult to hear in Milton’s works the grating sound of misogyny emerging through the frictions of the flesh.” Burrow then looks at Milton’s unfortunate tendency to come across as a prig and his “brutal sense of self-worth”, concluding that in order to “like Milton we really need to go right back to the beginning”.

This beginning, Burrow says, can be found in Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-1642 by Edward Jones, which looks at the works that allow us to be “vivid witnesses to the processes of deliberation and interior dialogue by which poets become poets.”

The quatercentenary of Milton’s birth was in 2008. The celebratory shenanigans – the conferences, public lectures, biographies and privy pieces of self-promotion that in our wicked age accompany all major anniversaries – are over. But one key question remains unanswered. How is it possible to like Milton?

There is certainly a great deal to dislike. Most people would think of him as an overlearned poet who combines labyrinthine syntax with a wide range of moral and intellectual vices. His views on sex and women, for example, were mostly gruesome. In Paradise Lost he described the perfect union of loving angels with beguiling delight: ‘If Spirits embrace,/Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure/Desiring’. But in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he declared that if mortals didn’t find a perfect spiritual mate they could end up having to ‘grind in the mill of an undelighted and servil copulation’. ‘Grind’ is such a terrible verb to use there. It combines traces of the abject Samson, milling for the Philistines, with simple lack of mortal lubrication in a way that makes you feel it’s a very bad idea indeed to be made of flesh. Even in the prelapsarian world imagined in Paradise Lost women are condemned to a secondary relationship to the divine. Milton’s most dislikeable line – ‘Hee for God only, shee for God in him’ – suggests that Eve spent all day gazing at Adam for shadows of reflected divinity. When Adam eats the apple he is described as being ‘fondly overcome with Femal charm’. Not all of Paradise Lost is quite that hard on Eve, with whom Milton at his kinder moments seems to be almost in love, and whom he sometimes treats as a virtual embodiment of the wayward poetic fancy. But it is not difficult to hear in Milton’s works the grating sound of misogyny emerging through the frictions of the flesh.

• Complete article: London Review of Books

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Book details

• The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume III: The Shorter Poems by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Estelle Haan
  EAN: 9780199609017
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• The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume VIII: De Doctrina Christiana by John K Hale, J Donald Cullington, Gordon Campbell, Thomas N Corns
  EAN: 9780199234516
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• Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-1642 by Edward Jones
  EAN: 9780199698707
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!