A moment with...Nigel Smith
Nigel Smith came to Princeton nine years ago from Oxford University. He is now a professor of English specializing in 17th-century poetry, chairman of Princeton’s Renaissance Studies Committee, and bass player and songwriter for the rock band Rackett (Princeton poet Paul Muldoon also is in the band). Smith’s latest book has a rather provocative title: Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? Smith a fierce advocate of John Milton, the author of the epic poem Paradise Lost, spoke with PAW contributor Merrell Noden ’78.
Why do you feel the need to defend Milton?
Two reasons. First of all, it is his 400th birthday this year, and secondly, he’s lost his standing. He was, I think for the Victorians, the equal of Shakespeare. And I suspect he might have been even more popular than Shakespeare in colonial America. He’s a fantastic, daring poet. But the general reader doesn’t see that, because he’s got a reputation for being difficult so people don’t go to him. I think Milton is one of the great radical rethinkers of many difficult predicaments, as well as an amazingly gifted poet just on the technical level.
Shakespeare was writing for the stage, creating believable men and women, and Milton was writing to make arguments. Does that make a difference?
I think all of that is true, and that explains why it’s apples and oranges. And of course you can derive thought systems in Shakespeare’s plays. There’s a way in which the problem plays are wonderfully intelligent explorations of the meaning of justice. I do see something more in Milton’s daringness, the daringness to rewrite a big chunk of the Bible and then to suggest almost that it should be replacing the Bible. There’s always in Milton that kind of overstepping of what appears to be the limit of what he should be doing.
But is he better than Shakespeare? Or is he simply more relevant for us, now, in the United States?
The respects in which I rank Milton above Shakespeare are to do with the writerly projects Milton takes on. They’re not to do with relevance. However, we have lived for some time in a moment when politics and thinking about politics matter. Milton fuses these different aspects that are often separate, so that the political and religious pamphleteer and the poet are one — he called his poetry the work of the right hand, and the pamphleteering the work of the left hand. But both hands belong to one intelligence.
Milton raises some very relevant questions about the historical predicament we find ourselves in. One example would be: Is Samson a terrorist in Milton’s portrayal? That was an argument that [Oxford professor] John Carey raised in the TLS [Times Literary Supplement]: What do we do with a text like this, where you have this massive act of murderous resistance produced by the hero of the poem?
Milton’s treatment of free will, of slavery and liberty — these are all things that haven’t gone away. Jefferson and Adams were keen readers of Milton. Miltonic language is embedded in the language of the Constitution and the language of politics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I think Milton wrote Paradise Lost as a guide to how to keep your liberty. To Milton, a king will always land you under tyranny. Single rule is bad. He’s one of the great English republicans.
Another poet, Princeton professor Paul Muldoon, writes the lyrics for your band, Rackett.
When I first came to Princeton, Paul took me out and to a big extent got me settled here. I noticed all these old cassettes on the floor of his Volvo. And I realized we had a common interest. Paul loves going to concerts. I realized quickly how important the achievements and the charisma of the great troubadours are to him as a poet. Dylan, of course. Ray Davies. Bruce [Springsteen] is very important to Paul. And Warren Zevon, with whom he wrote some songs.
It was the beginning of 2004. I had been teaching in summer school that previous summer in Santa Fe. I played in a Native American and Hispanic rock ’n’ roll band. I sent Paul a picture of me onstage with a Native American lead guitarist. [Wearing a] cowboy hat. Imagine coming to America and doing that! Fantastic! And I sent it to Paul, and as always with Paul, a few minutes later a reply came back: “We’re having a band. Please set the attached lyrics to music soon.” So I went down into my basement and I took this lyric, and I wrote a song and recorded it. And that’s still a song that’s right in the middle of our set. It’s “Meat and Drink,” from [the album] Standing Room Only.
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2 Responses
Terry Vance ’77
18 Years AgoMilton, the Bard, and Bluto
I very much enjoyed reading Merrell Noden ‘78’s interview with Nigel Smith (A Moment With, June 11) and returning to the issue of Milton’s “unpopularity” despite undeniable genius, which was the subject of courses I took both as an undergraduate and as an alumnus. And many moviegoers have been exposed to the same question through the only classroom scene in Animal House, which has a professor vainly trying to engage his class in a discussion of Paradise Lost. The great English critic Samuel Johnson anticipated the reaction of the Faber College students: “Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.”
With Shakespeare, Johnson cited a quite different frustration — the Bard’s ability to please without the need for a critics enhancement: “He was read, admired, studied, and imitated, while he was yet deformed with all the improprieties which ignorance and neglect could accumulate upon him; while the reading was not yet rectified, nor his allusions understood: yet then did Dryden pronounce that ... Those nor his allusions understood; yet then did Dryden pronounce ‘that... Those who accuse (Shakespeare] to have wanted learning. give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature: he looked inwards and found her there.’”
Shakespeare’s evocation in Animal House is quite different from that of Milton: it is clear to the discerning filmgoer that when the “naturally learned” Bluto Blutarsky (John Belushi) hands a six-pack to a pledge whose brother’s car has been destroyed and says, “My advice to you... is to start drinking heavily,” his inspiration is Henry V (“I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety”).
My fear is that until Milton can be remade in popular culture, he will not soon regain his popular standing.
Mo Keita
1 Day AgoMilton, Shakespeare, and Animal House
“He saw Nature, as Dryden expresses it, ‘through the spectacles of books;’ and on most occasions calls learning to his assistance.”
Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton
In a letter to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Terry Vance ’77 quoted Samuel Johnson twice, once to bury Milton and once to praise Shakespeare, without noticing that the two passages form a single ambush. Johnson borrowed Dryden’s compliment to the Shakespeare who “needed not the spectacles of books,” then turned it against Milton. The bookish poet stands caught in the act. Claire Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren have identified Milton as the annotator of a First Folio at the Free Library of Philadelphia, where he collated Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet against quarto editions and traced the gravedigger’s song to Tottel’s miscellany nearly a century before Lewis Theobald. Johnson grumbled that Shakespeare’s editors had added little to his power of pleasing; among the earliest of them was the very poet Johnson set against Shakespeare, spectacles and all. None of this rescues Paradise Lost from Johnson’s complaint about its want of human interest; it shows only that the two halves of his antithesis were on reading terms. Those who “desert our master, and seek for companions” should know that the master was busy annotating the companion.
Mr. Vance’s source study for Bluto is sound, and the Folio completes it. Milton bracketed passages in the choruses of Henry V, but if his habits in Henry IV are any guide, he left the tavern scenes nearly untouched and the pot of ale to Bluto. Pledges should read on: the Boy who wishes for “a pot of ale and safety” is posted to guard the luggage at Agincourt, where Gower reports “there’s not a boy left alive.” Johnson would call that instruction; Faber College would call it a road trip.
Jeff Nelligan’s mock-scholarly When the Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor: Animal House in Western Intellectual Thought has meanwhile inducted Animal House into the canon. Where popular culture has taken up Milton at all, it has joined the Devil’s party, though Paul Stevens finds much of Shakespeare’s Richard III in Milton’s Satan.
Mr. Vance fears that until Milton is remade in popular culture, he “will not soon regain his popular standing.” I take counsel from Bluto. Was it over when Eve ate the fruit? The archangel Michael spent two books explaining that it was not.
“Don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring, too.”
Professor Dave Jennings (Donald Sutherland), National Lampoon’s Animal House