***

The Rumpus: You moved overseas in the fall of 2009 and Miami University Press announced that Mitko, which follows the story of an American who initiates a relationship with a male hustler shortly after arriving in a foreign city, won its novella contest in January 2011. What sparked the writing of this book and how long did it take you to complete it?

Garth Greenwell: The first and most important provocation for writing the novella was simply the experience of living in Bulgaria. When I moved here two years ago, I’d never spent an extended period abroad. I arrived a month before the other American teachers at my school and had weeks of solitude to explore my new city. I’d studied the language a bit before arriving and could make myself understood for basic necessities, but nearly everything around me was entirely opaque, and I felt all the usual displacement, bewilderment, and loneliness, emotions that are at the heart of Mitko. I also found myself entirely captivated by this place, which is unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. Sofia is an ancient city, and Bulgaria has had an extraordinary history, from a period as one of the great powers, rivaling the Byzantine empire, to a history of successive subjections: Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Soviet. I’ve never been anywhere where such a rich and layered history is so visible: there is an area downtown where one can stand in front of a mosque built during the Ottoman empire, descend a staircase to a hallway interrupted by Roman ruins, turn into a bright European metro station, and then board a Soviet-era train. There’s an extraordinary sense of eras and empires colliding into each other, their rises and falls legible in their human traces. And there’s also natural beauty, my sense of which grew over the course of my first year here, as I saw more of the country outside of Sofia. I wanted to write something exploring the beauties and ravages and contradictions of my surroundings, and the ways in which those surroundings seemed to influence the lives of the people I was meeting.

At the same time, so much around me seemed very foreign, I also found that much of what I was experiencing, for all of its strangeness, returned me to earlier experiences, especially to my childhood and youth in Kentucky. Half by accident and half by seeking them out, I stumbled on erotic communities here—gay cruising spots like those I describe in the book—that were nearly identical in their expectations and mores to those I had known in the States. Thanks to improving language skills, I was able to engage increasingly with the people I was meeting, and then found that there was a secrecy and shame about them that also reminded me of the men I had met in my first sexual encounters in Louisville in the 1990s. So writing about the places and communities in Mitko was also a way of reflecting on and processing my own experiences growing up in what seems in some ways like a similar environment, though those connections remain largely tacit in the novella. (I’ve explored them more explicitly in a recent essay.) I wanted to write a book that could serve as something like a literary record of those places and lives. I wrote the first draft of the novella very quickly, beginning it in the spring and finishing it by the end of the summer.

Rumpus: In Beloit Poetry Journal’s recent symposium on gay poetry, politics, and poetics, you identify Bulgaria as a place where “powerful public figures warn of ‘faggots’ on mainstream news programs and where last summer a man was killed in Borisova Gradina… by nationalists who said they were ‘cleaning up the queers.’” Given its Bulgarian setting, do you see Mitko’s publication as a political act?

Greenwell: It’s hard to see the publication of the book in English as a political act. But I would very much like for Mitko to appear in Bulgarian, and there I think it could have some significance. I’m still just in the beginning of my reading of Bulgarian literature, but I’m told by friends that there’s almost nothing in the tradition that offers a portrait of gay lives as worthy of a full measure of human dignity. In popular culture, nearly all representations of gay people present them as stereotypes, the butt of jokes (though this does seem to be changing); and, as I wrote in the BPJ symposium, there is shocking tolerance of speech about gay people in the public sphere, including speech that goes beyond what even the most conservative mainstream figure in the States or Western Europe would dare.

Part of what I would like for Mitko to do is to make visible communities that to this point have remained almost entirely invisible in this part of the world. Gay writing is only just emerging here (including in the work of the very talented young poet Nikolay Atanassov, whose work is appearing in translation now in places like Poetry International and American Poetry Review); I’d be very happy for Mitko to have a place as part of that emergence.

Rumpus: And yet, to exclusively categorize the novella as “gay literature” seems limiting to me. One of Mitko’s accomplishments is its ability to expose and engage the complexities and ambiguities that accompany intimate relationships both physical and emotional, regardless of whether the players in those relationships are hetero- or homosexual. Isn’t the book’s real concern the universal link between longing and power?

Greenwell: I think that’s exactly right. In the BPJ symposium, I tried to think a little bit about my own ambivalence about “gay literature” as a category and “gay writer” as an identity. On one hand, I do think that there is a gay tradition in literature, and that tradition has been intensely important to me as both a reader and a writer; in some sense it is important to me to identify with it. On the other hand, I absolutely reject any notion of “gay literature” that might cut off works engaged with gay lives from the larger, “universal” (if there is such a thing) themes and traditions of the literary imagination.

This question of the relationship between local circumstance—those facts (of gender, class, race) that might get in the way of readerly identification with a text—and universal significance is one of the thorniest and least resolvable in literature, I think. It matters, in some crucial, essential way, that Mitko is a book about certain lives in a certain place—that it is, among other things, a gay book—but surely one of literature’s functions is to train our sympathies to allow us access to shared experience across circumstances that can seem to (or that actually do) divide us.

When I think about the books about love that have seemed to speak most powerfully to me about some universal experience, it strikes me that nearly all of them seem studies in various kinds of extremity that quite decidedly distance them from my daily experience. Death in Venice and Lolita are studies in pedophilia, the poems of Frank Bidart are frequently meditations on violence, the tenth book of the Metamorphoses explores in each of its stories disordered love, what we might think of as perversion. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James makes an argument for the use of the extreme case as a particularly effective object of examination, functioning as a kind of magnification to allow us to study ubiquitous phenomena that in their daily manifestations can be difficult to see clearly. The particular circumstances explored in Mitko may exert a special pressure on the characters in the novella, and certain aspects of their experience—prostitution, cruising, anonymous sex—may be foreign to the experience of some readers, but I do hope that the book is also invested in larger themes familiar to our shared lives: loneliness, ambivalence, the impossibility of certain or absolute knowledge of another, and also, as you say, the relationship between longing and power.

Rumpus: When Mitko shares a video clip of a much-loved French songstress, you describe her as “affecting an extremity of dignified, photogenic devastation,” a posturing the narrator vehemently resists. You’re a classically educated opera singer. How has that training influenced you as a writer? Do you find any connection between “voice” as musically scored for stage vs. that which appears on the page?

"Fag = Subhuman"

Greenwell: Classical singing gave me a sense of the physicality of language I’m not sure I could have acquired elsewhere, and the tradition of the art song was my first experience of literature. The settings of Schubert, Schumann, Duparc, Hugo Wolf were my education in poetry, and Benjamin Britten’s settings of English poetry seem to me the best interpretive readings those texts are likely to receive. In both prose and poetry, as reader and writer I do feel as though I experience the shapes of sentences and lines physically, in something like the same way I experience musical lines; certainly I owe whatever sense I have of the music of language to my life as a singer. And it occurs to me now that perhaps the long, bel canto lines of much of the repertoire I sang are also the source of the excitement I feel at language stretched over great distances, an experience I try to recreate through various strategies for extending syntax.

In terms of both dramatic and emotional form, the love I feel for chamber music (especially the chamber operas of Benjamin Britten) informs the excitement I feel about lyric forms in both poetry and prose; I love the sense of concentration such forms bear, of emotion heightened through relatively minimal means. There’s a kind of maximalist approach to minimal material in a work like Britten’s Turn of the Screw—which, in addition to the chamber size of its ensemble, is structured on the model of a theme and variations, so that the whole work is based on a principle of obsessively reworking the same ideas. This is a brilliant approach for an adaptation of Henry James, whose work makes so much of so little, constructing whole worlds of interior experience from the lightest visual trace (a raised eyebrow, a shoulder turned away). It seems to me that this degree of attention—a kind of pressure exerted on the surface of the world, hoping it will crack—is at the core of that province of the literary imagination we call the lyric.

Rumpus: Emotional intensity heightened by “relatively minimal means, ” it seems, is precisely what the French singer lacks: “It wasn’t the manipulation, which of course is the aim of all art, that offended me,” you write, “but rather its bareness, the vulgarity of its methods, so that the whole apparatus of provocation and response lay stripped to its essential meanness.” What has the young prostitute, Mitko, in common with the French performer in terms of beauty, public pretense, and string-pulling? Do you agree with the narrator’s assertion that art’s aim is manipulation?

Greenwell: The source of the narrator’s growing unease throughout the novella is a sense that he is having an emotional response to Mitko incommensurate with the reality of their relationship, which is—to use the word the narrator uses repeatedly—a transaction. In the scene you mention, the act of their watching this video together appears at first to be a kind of opening up on Mitko’s part, an attempt to share a private significance. But the singer, who seems so histrionic, so staged in her emotions, so unaccomplished in her art, serves instead to puncture and deflate the narrator’s emotion toward Mitko, and to make him suspect Mitko’s actions—including the sharing of this video—as themselves a kind of artfulness, a cynical manipulation. This artfulness (and, as the narrator notes, if Mitko is an artist in this sense he is far more skilled than that French singer) is a kind of power, as the narrator’s money is a kind of power, so that both of the characters are in some sense prone to some constraining force.

I do think the narrator is right that art is engaged in “provocation and response,” and that its goal is manipulation: by putting a frame around something, in images or words or sounds, art determines what we see, and so attempts to determine what we feel. Great art makes us feel richer for that manipulation and therefore grateful for it; bad art makes us feel cheap.

Rumpus: Rumor has it recently appointed Poet Laureate Philip Levine wanted to be a novelist, but claims poetry is better suited to his attention span and temperament. Whitman and Cavafy appear in Mitko’s pages, and many readers know you primarily as a poet. What is it about prose that attracts you? Do you work on multiple projects simultaneously? What does each genre demand of you in terms of attention and methodology?

Alexander Nevski Cathedral

Greenwell: I’ve always written critical essays, but only started working in prose as a medium for more imaginative writing since moving to Bulgaria. In some ways I don’t fully understand the shift in genre is tied to the shift in culture, landscape, and language. Perhaps it’s simply that I have felt overwhelmed by new information since arriving here and have needed a more spacious medium to process it. Poetry so often feels like a kind of sculpture to me, a kind of carving out of speech; it has been a pleasure to work in prose, where I can think in larger units—the unit of the sentence or scene, instead of the unit of the image or line or (more often) of the single word.

I do find myself tending to work on only one project at a time, and when I’m engaged in longer prose pieces, other writing can come to seem like an interruption; as a result, I’ve found myself doing less critical work in the last couple of years. I haven’t written any poems for some time, and now I’m deep into another prose project. I hope that eventually I’ll find myself writing poems again. Whether working in poetry or prose, since starting work as a high school teacher five years ago, my writing practice has remained mostly unchanged: a fairly strict regimen of two hours a day. I stick to that as religiously as I can, and now it seems to have become a fairly natural rhythm—though I often long for a life able to accommodate longer stretches of work.

Rumpus: Like the book’s protagonist, you’re an American teacher of literature at the American College of Sofia. How has the book been received there? Do you worry about confusion between what’s fictive vs. that which is autobiographically based?

Greenwell: The book deliberately draws parallels between the life of its narrator and the life of its author: everything we learn about the narrator’s biography, about the facts of his past and present situation, matches my own. And so my adamancy in refusing to confirm or deny where autobiography ends and fiction begins can seem (even to me) like coyness. I can’t say that I worry about confusion between fiction and nonfiction, except in the least interesting ways; for me, at least, there’s a pleasure to be had in that confusion, an energizing tension. The distinction between the genres is most profoundly I think one not so much of material as of orientation: where the narrative of Mitko makes use of autobiographical material, it does so for the purposes of its own advantage and art making, not for the sake of any commitment to something like “the truth.” It’s that essential commitment (however muddy or impure), and not the accident of alignment in regard to facts, that marks (for me) the distinction between the genres. So far, the attention the book has gotten here, both in the College and in the larger ex-pat community, has been supportive.

Rumpus: One of things we have in common is life lived overseas. Have you found a community of artists or authors (ex-pats or otherwise) with whom you share ideas or exchange work? What are the challenges you face as an American writer living abroad? Are there advantages?

Greenwell: I have made some friends among writers in Sofia, but I wouldn’t say that I’ve found a community of artists. Part of that is due to a demanding job; given my responsibilities at the American College, it’s nearly all I can do to make time for writing, and I seldom make it to readings or other events. But it’s also partly a choice, since the most valuable thing I find about being abroad is a certain degree of apartness—the solitude that, even as (at times) it seems a kind of suffering, also seems necessary for my writing. Writing has increasingly come to seem to me an act of almost absolute privacy, and I think that’s largely due to the fact that I’m not part of a writing community now, and so I can go months and months without showing my writing to anyone. But of course that privacy or solitude isn’t really absolute, and life abroad still allows for a great deal of connection. When I’m ready to share a draft, I have a few readers who have been friends and trusted critics for years.

One disadvantage of a life abroad, at least here in Bulgaria, is the difficulty of finding English books. I teach in English, but at times (usually in the middle of grading a batch of essays) I do worry about losing touch with English as a medium for expert, supple, artful communication. But mostly I think that this distance, too, is an advantage, and the fact that English is not the language of the streets here helps allow for the added dimension of privacy that I find so fruitful for what remains the solitary work of making meaning on the page.

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Nick Lantz won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize for his book of poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (Graywolf Press). His second book, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House, was selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky for the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press). Nick was the 2007-2008 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and is the recipient of Gettysburg College’s 2010-2011 Emerging Writer Lectureship.

The Rumpus: With contest submissions often exceeding a thousand, you manage to win the Bakeless and Felix Pollak Prizes in the same year—congrats on the publication of We Don’t Know We Don’t Know and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House! Although We Don’t Know We Don’t Know is technically your debut, I suspect it contains the more recent work. Did you complete one manuscript before starting the next, or was there some overlap between the two? Can you talk a little bit about what distinguishes each project, as well as how long the manuscripts were in circulation before you received the good news?

Nick Lantz: We Don’t Know was taken very quickly, all things considered. I finished it around August 2008, sent it out to contests that fall, and got the good news from Bread Loaf in early 2009. The Lightning took a bit longer. It’s the much-revised remnants of my MFA thesis, and it had been collecting rejection slips since 2005. A poem in that book alludes to the Ship of Theseus, a boat that was supposedly maintained over many years by replacing its parts piecemeal as they deteriorated, begging the question of whether it was still the same ship, and, if not, at what point it ceased being that original ship. That’s how I feel about The Lightning. If you were to dig up my actual MFA thesis (please don’t), you’d see only a handful of the original poems. With The Lightning, I worked from the poems up. I was figuring out what that book was about as I assembled, disassembled, and reassembled it.

With We Don’t Know, I worked in the opposite direction—I had the book title and sections titles and the general theme before I wrote a single poem, though of course it did change as it came together. As a result, the writing process of We Don’t Know was much more compact—maybe nine or ten months—and (almost) all of the poems in it were written for it, that is, with their thematic/formal connection to the manuscript in mind. Because of the time-frames involved, the poems in We Don’t Know feel more like part of a set, because they were written at more or less the same time.

The Lightning contains poems I wrote in the first semester of my MFA program all the way through a poem or two that I slipped into the book right before I sent it to the publisher. I see more of what I’ll diplomatically call my development as a writer in that one. There are poems in the book that I just wouldn’t write today—I still like them, but I just wouldn’t write them anymore. And there was definitely overlap between the two books. While they are very different collections in some ways, there were a handful of poems that really could have gone either way, into either book, and I did a lot of last-minute agonizing about which ones would end up where.

Rumpus: We Don’t Know features four subtitled sections; The Lightning contains three parts. How do you tackle book-length organization? How do such sections help frame the work?

Lantz: Back when I was an MFA student, the poet/fiction writer/memoirist Jesse Lee Kercheval suggested that I think about section breaks as a device for emphasizing particular poems. Maybe this is intuitive, but I hadn’t thought of it that way—I’d mostly thought of sections in terms of thematic groupings. But now I like to think of section breaks as the equivalent of line or stanza breaks in a poem. They create a pause, a breath, and they also put a little bit more weight on what comes before and after them. They’re a way of generating rhythm on the macro-level of the book, and the poet can subtly direct the reader to key poems by controlling their placement within those sections. An extreme version of that is the second section in We Don’t Know, which contains only one poem, “Will There Be More Than One ‘Questioner’?” That poem was one of the stranger poems I’ve written, and I wanted it to stand by itself within the manuscript. It certainly needs some breathing room on either side of it, and putting it in its own section was a way of achieving that.

Beyond that, organization for me usually amounts to spreading things around evenly. If I have two poems that mention dogs, say, I don’t want those poems next to each other. And I try to alternate tone and length, when possible. If I have poems that are part of a series, I try to space them out. In a few cases, though, I’ve had poems that I really wanted in a particular spot in the manuscript because of something specific the poem did. The last poem in We Don’t Know ends mid-sentence, and I knew pretty early on that I would end the book with that poem, just because I liked the idea of ending a book mid-sentence. For a similar reason, “The Last Words of Pancho Villa” was variously the first or last poem in The Lightning in earlier drafts, though in the final book, it’s the penultimate poem.

Rumpus: Lightning’s sections emphasize place as do titles of poems such as “U.S. Route 50, Nevada, The Loneliest Road in America,” “The Aging Sci-Fi Actor Speaks to Third Graders at the Local Planetarium,” and “The Soul Diva, Past Her Prime, Visits the Holy Land.” What’s funny (and fantastic) is that in the case of your poetry, titles most often act as the primary—if not sole—sources of narrative stability. Throughout the collection, imagination rebels against physical and temporal confines. Is place more than a jumping-off point, something acknowledged only to be abandoned? Is the act of anchoring readers via titles a deliberate one?

Lantz: Well, geography has always been a resonant thing for me. I grew up in California, which contains about every biome and geographical formation imaginable. Mountains, valleys, forests, coasts, bays, lakes, rivers, estuaries, high desert, low desert, grasslands, chaparral, and on and on. The utter bigness of the Sierras, for example, just imprints itself on you. Death Valley is punishing and beautiful like nothing else. These are the things I think about when I’m staring out at the dingy, weeks-old snow in Wisconsin in January. As far as I’m concerned, the Midwest doesn’t have geography; it has weather. And looking through my poems, I can see the point where I started writing more about weather than geography.

I do often, and very consciously, use titles to situate a reader in a particular place, even if I’m going to abandon it quickly. Or, more broadly, I often use titles as a dumping ground for exposition or information that I want to keep out of the poem itself. With all three poems that you mention, I want the reader to know the starting point going into the poem. I certainly use abstract titles just like any other poet, but expository, situating titles have always attracted me ever since I read James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” for the first time. I’d also be lying if I didn’t admit to loving titles that are on the flashy side. Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embraced of the Human Form may just be the best book title ever. Ever. Though I’ll allow that there are occasionally good reasons to leave a poem untitled, generally speaking, if you don’t have a good title for a poem, you don’t have a good poem yet.

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In order to become an epic poet, Milton believed he must also refuse “lustral waters.” In other words, aspiring artists must remain chaste.

As an undergraduate, “Lycidas” left me cold. Paradise Lost was a total turn-off. In the margin near Book IV’s characterization of Adam and Eve, I took a single note: so misogyny begins. Not exactly the revelation of the year, but what do you expect from a nineteen-year-old Dance major enrolled in a 17th C. Brit Lit survey course? I read the assigned passages and studied those I thought would be on the final exam. Soon after, I dismissed John Milton as another dead-white-male-canonical-poet among endless-dead-white-male-canonical-poets, and then readied myself for the next semester.

Much has changed. There’s a lot more pleasure in learning. Several times each year, I immerse myself in a poet’s life and works. In the past, I’ve selected those whose poetry I admire. This winter, I decided to choose a poet whose writing I resist. Standing in my office, I scoured the shelves for the least appealing prospect:

For contemplation he and valor formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace,
He for God only, she for God in him…

I’ve always pictured Milton as a self-righteous conservative, some self-appointed Moses figure parting the Biblical seas with his metrical staff. Biographical accounts contrast such assumptions; turns out, Milton was more rebellious and politically left than I realized. He was a risk-taker. He was arrested and imprisoned. Thanks, in part, to Andrew Marvell, he barely escaped a death sentence. He was, by all accounts, one of the best educated English citizens of his time, (re)inventing not only the story of Genesis, but his own grammar, as well as the history of British culture and religion. While in Italy, Milton spent time with Galileo. Areopagitica (a must-read on the subjects of licensing and censorship) influenced our Founding Fathers. Milton liked to wear his hair long – so long, in fact, his tresses helped inspire a nickname: friends and foes at Cambridge called him “The Lady.”

The more I study Milton, in fact, the more appealing he becomes. Although filled with classical allusions, his poems don’t seem nearly as icy as I initially found them.  His quirks are amusing; his many contradictions, more so. If you don’t have the extra hours to submerge yourself in Milton’s oeuvre, following are a few tips I’ve gleaned from recent study.

***

Memorize, Memorize, Memorize: Milton started to lose his eyesight in 1646. He never saw his son, John Jr., nor did he know the faces of his second and third wives. By 1652, he was completely blind and, according to his nephew, composed Paradise Lost in his head during overnight sessions that lasted well into early morning. By day, he dictated the text to whomever could write down the words.

Writing an epic in your head and then reciting it from memory? Consider the difficulties of tracking scansion and enjambment! Milton’s power to plot and then recall was remarkable. It was also the result of intense self-discipline. As a student (like many of his peers) Milton kept a “Commonplace” book. He filled its pages with poetry, quotations, practical information, political and rhetorical strategies. In essence, the book was a personal anthology of ancient and classical literature. By recording such material by hand Milton not only observed and absorbed a variety of linguistic strategies, he also practiced the art of memorization. Such training, one imagines, only aided the elderly man’s epic task of blind literary invention…

***

The Allies of Ambition & Arrogance: Although Milton didn’t foresee the physical obstacles he’d overcome while composing Paradise Lost, he did predict his own greatness. While in his early 20s, the poet announced that his epic (still unwritten for another twenty-five years) would become an unforgettable work of English literature. It’s in “Ad Patrem (To His Father)” Milton clearly articulates his belief in having been “born a poet” whose destiny it is to “walk, crowned with gold, through the temples of the skies and with the harp’s soft accompaniment…sing[ing] sweet songs to which the stars shall echo and the vault of heaven from pole to pole.” According to Frank Kermode, we’ll “never find it possible to match Milton’s self-esteem, or share his estimate of the vast work he felt he had been called to do.” Whether ambition or arrogance (a little of both?), Milton obviously saw the writer’s life not only as a vocation, but a calling – presumably from God. Once this self-prophecy was articulated, Milton dedicated himself to those daily practices he believed would bring his vision to fruition.

***

Calling All Virgins – Go Vegan! According to “Elegia Sexta” (Milton’s fascinating letter to John Diodati), a person with high poetic aspirations must “let herbs furnish his innocent diet.” He must also “drink sober draughts from the pure spring.” No baby-back ribs with sweet sauce. No tipping back booze. What twenty-one-year-old Milton advocated was unyielding temperance, his theory being that the artistic product is shaped by physical purity. And speaking of purity, watching his diet wasn’t enough: in order to become an epic poet, Milton believed he must also refuse “lustral waters.” In other words, aspiring artists – those whose names are destined to survive throughout the ages – must remain chaste.

I know what you’re thinking. A twice-widowed husband who fathers five children? Obviously, he gave up the goods at some point! Enter Milton’s evolving personal philosophy. Apparently, “appropriate” sexual activity within marriage was itself a form of “chastity,” something Milton practiced throughout his adult life. Needless to say, the poet’s ideas about marriage, as well as women, divorce and polygamy are complicated. His central point, however, isn’t: emerging poets shouldn’t be afraid of self-discipline. Should you cut pleasure completely? The choice is yours – Milton isn’t exactly known for his erotic sonnets, after all. Taking the work seriously is key, however, as is a steadfast commitment to the art.

***

Write Your Own Music: Milton separated himself from the pack from the very beginning. In “L’Allegro,” the poet characterizes “sweetest” Shakespeare as “…fancy’s child, / warbl[ing] his native wood-notes wild” (lines 133-134). Suggests Milton, imagination inspires Shakespeare’s rowdy lyrics. Milton’s creative acts, in contrast, result from exacting labor and unwavering intellectual pursuit. Whereas Shakespeare is a poet of pathos, Milton (via his commitments to reason and restraint) shapes himself as a poet of logos.

After mastering sonnets, translating Psalms, and spending years writing political treatises, defenses and pamphlets, Milton eschewed tradition while writing Paradise Lost. In lieu of fashionable heroic couplets, he wrote his epic in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Was blank verse a model of freedom for a people struggling with the presence of tyranny? Did the form suggest Milton’s vision of Paradise Lost as epic drama, as well as a poem? In 1668, the poet concedes that his metrical choice attempted to liberate the “Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Rhyming.” If this seems hyperbolic, consider the fact that John Dryden “translates” Paradise Lost into an opera complete with rhyming couplets, in order to make the epic more accessible to the general public. Simply stated, Milton’s commitment to blank verse – the closest verse imitation of ordinary speech – placed him outside the literary trends of his day. By embracing a form usually reserved for theater, he may have compromised his initial readership. However, he also laid the foundation for future poems as diverse as Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and Frost’s “Directive.”

***

Don’t Rush to Publish: This may be the most difficult example Milton provides aspiring poets. Although a youthful Milton recognized his potential, he made a point of delaying the publication of his first collection until he was thirty-six or seven. It’s presumed he wrote the book’s opening poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” shortly after his twenty-first birthday. Why the wait? Milton hoped to make his entrance into print remarkable. A man with such ambition wouldn’t be satisfied unless his published poems lived up to his very high expectations. He had, after all, already declared himself a genius!

While it’s not always easy to withhold the work, Milton’s postponement afforded time for further study. He spent six years at his father’s house poring over literature, religion, science, history and politics, among other subjects. He read and read and read. He perfected eight or so languages, a variety that without question influenced the rhythm and syntax of his future writings. When his work finally emerged, it proved he had the goods.

***

Shara Lessley

Granted, there are plenty of ways in which Milton missed the mark. For your safety, I’d avoid blood-letting, penning pamphlets on regicide, public verbal spars with well-known rhetoricians from the Netherlands. When confronted by warring soldiers or other threats of bodily harm, the best defense probably isn’t to tack a sonnet to your front door, promising poetic immortality to those willing to spare your life.

But all things considered, who can argue with this?

SONNET XXIII

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from Death by force though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the Old Law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But O, as to embrace me she inclined
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

***

Milton gives us hell breaking loose (line 918, Book IV of Paradise Lost). His dramatic mask, Comus, introduces “a sable cloud / turn[ing] forth her silver lining.” Vacillation between these poles – silver-lined heaven and hell split apart at the seams – seems to me a summary of the writer’s life. Granted, some people find John Milton a “bore and a prig.” Others find him superior to Shakespeare. I doubt I’ll find myself craving Milton’s work the way I do his contemporary John Donne’s, for example. But now that it’s four hundred years past the anniversary of Milton’s birth, perhaps it’s time to reconsider former assumptions. Who knows, the old man may surprise us yet.

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