I'm worried about generals, and so I'm trying to commit myself to doing more freewriting, as a way of turning all this reading that's in my head into words. I really don't know what I'm going to talk about for two hours--I feel totally devoid of ideas, even though each individual text seems weird and productive.
In an effort to get some one last thing done today I turned to the Apology for Smectymnuus and to the Reason of Church Government and looked at the passages that Springarn suggested as ltierary criticism. What struck me is that Milton, despite his deeply original and entirely synthetic mind, is either reproducing or presenting the ideas of Sidney, with a slightly different focus. Milton shares the idea that poetry should be didactic, that it should provide the apparel of truth, that it should aid listeners towards virtue, and so on. He even shares the sense--that shocked me in Alexander, but that I found in Sidney when I looked more carefully--that any moment of impropriety, even any moment in which a hero or villain is not the best that they could possibly be, is a failure of the poet.
Milton, however, takes living so as to be able to write such a poem as a goal. He, I suspect, is benefitting from a higher status of poetry--Sidney would not have done well, suggesting that his highest end was to write a divine poem. Milton is also more literal about treating Scripture as poem; his readings in the Fathers and his attention to critical debates and to the texts have left him convinced that Scripture is literally poetic.
If I had to clarify the differences between the two, I would begin from Milton's description of his amorous phase in the Apology. There he is incredibly conscious of this as a phase of his youth that he has outgrown--in general, Milton is more careful about poetry being predominantly a youthful activity, except for those inspired by God. Milton's model of what one learns from poetry is deeply idiosyncratic--following what he says in Areopagitica, as a wise man, he learns his own sort of wisdom from a bad book. Where Milton's theory is a phase theory--he finishes various things and moves past them--Sidney leaves a theoretical hole with his apostrophe to love. (I WONDER: if any lapse from perfection on the part of a character is a lapse on the part of the author, isn't Astrophil's lapse of control an admission of Sidney's lack of control. It offers us a way of reading out of the poem into biography, perhaps. I wonder how far I can push William Alexander in this generals exam... Does Stella's proposed compromise--love but not any food for desire--reflect on Sidney's sense of what a love poet has to do? Does Spenser do a better job of this in his Amoretti?)
Inspiration is the next difference. Spenser, of course, treats divinely inspired poetry as the first of his three categories of poetry, but his treatise puts both that and heathen philosophical verse in a distinct category. For Milton, on the other hand, the true poet is the Davidic poet, touched with the fire of God's Seraphim. Milton does believe that a few in all nations are given this talent--presumably, that is, non-Christians may also be inspired--but only a very few. Related to this is Milton's conception of the "poetasters": he means the "libidinous" poets and playwrights, and libidinous here largely means secular; talentless amateurs certainly aren't in his good poet category, but they are not really his concern. For Sidney, on the other hand, the difference between poet and bastard-poet has something to do with style (post horse to Helicon) and form (ballad, accentual, etc--the old ballad he talks about moving him despite being rough), and learning (in his mind a pretty good related measure is class.)
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