David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.

Tuesday, 21 January 2025

Orlando Reade, What in Me is Dark

 Orlando Reade, What in Me is Dark, The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost (Jonathan Cape)

One possible title for a literary memoir by me- in the unlikely event of anybody wanting to read one- could be John Milton, His Part in My Downfall. My downfall was hardly of the magnitude of being cast out of heaven but my school career finished on a low note without a grade A in Eng Lit and it was in part attributable to Milton, Chaucer and Forster being grouped together on the same paper - the three books I cared less about- that I actually failed. And so I went to a third division university and never felt quite so scholarly again.
Orlando Reade's survey of the legacy of Paradise Lost has somewhat more import. I'm not convinced works should be taken incomplete, like we did only books 1 and 2 and only two of the Canterbury Tales, which are incomplete anyway. I'm still full of excuses nearly half a century later but this is the first time I've ventured back into it and so only now catch up with some idea of what it's all about from Orlando Reade's unfolding synopsis.
I can't help thinking that Satan is the hero, or at least one of some sort and flawed, as the chief rebel angel who will not serve. While Reade traces the hero worship of Milton as a poet down through Wordsworth to Eliot's shift in sympathy towards him and Pound's implacable refusal to serve him in turn, he also makes uprisings such as those in Haiti and against the slave trade relatable to Milton's republican, puritan sympathies. While the underlying ideas are coherently comparable we might think of Auden's 'poetry makes nothing happen' and whether it really took a poem to make slaves perceive the iniquity of their situation.
One thing we are made aware of is the extent to which Milton was regarded as the greatest of poets up to and including the Victorian age and how Modernism saw through the magnificence and he's not been quite so fashionable ever since.
Much of that might be due to how Theology has become the study of what humankind wrote about their own invention, God, rather than the study of the God that Western civilisation had predicated its morality, government and wars on ever since a charismatic Jewish boy arrived to tell people how to live. It very soon became complicated, though, with such perplexing questions about why God had given human beings free will when they'd have been better off, and much less culpable, without it. That might be one reason why I don't 'get it' but I can also see how a major work offers so many possible approaches and presents the human situation, in Adam and Eve, as conflicted between aspiration to perfection and an inherently compromised fallen condition.
Reade continues his survey of revolutionaries with a debt to Paradise Lost through George Eliot, Fidel Castro, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, Malcolm X and CLR James to the unlikely Jordan Peterson before returning to the parallel in the metaphor for Heaven and Hell provided by his own teaching being split between Princeton and New Jersey prisons. It makes for a broad, idiosyncratic sweep of cultural reference points not overly academic and never less than of interest. I'm not a lot further persuaded that I'm going back to the poem any time soon, though. I wouldn't dispute its significance or the place it has in the canon but I'm happy enough to have had the insight offered here rather than plough through the twelve books of it.
One big question remains about the very first line,
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit 
that Reade stresses in uniform iambics on syllables 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10. I'd understood it to begin on a blast of a fanfare with stresses on all except 8 and 9. If there's that much to think about in line 1, how much remains in the next 11 thousand of them. Sometimes one has to be satisfied with a passing familiarity on things that will never be one's first choice subjects.

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