Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on March 16, 2009
Literary Imagination 2009 11(2):136-153; doi:10.1093/litimag/imp008
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
William Empson: The Milton Controversy
[Reading University Library]
*John Haffenden. E-mail: j.haffenden@sheffield.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
A leading article in the TLS on September 5, 19581 warmly endorsed the critical assessment by Rosemond Tuve, as reported in her talk published in a recent issue of The Listener (August 28), of the ways in which critics of Milton over the last 150 years have approached his imagery. For example, it said, the Victorians over-emphasized the merely descriptive function of Milton's images; more recently, the fashion has been to harp upon their archetypal or "mythical" significance. But the true way to appreciate the dynamic of Milton's images is to understand them in the intellectual setting of his age: "We may not be able to accept them literally as theological truth, but we ought to be able to enter into them as a living pattern of thoughts about liberty and authority, dignity and obedience, order and impulse..."
F. R. Leavis—the "arch-anti-Miltonist," as he wryly reckoned himself to be labeled