A Preface to Paradise Lost

The poet who finds by introspection that the soul is mere chaos is like a policeman who, having himself stopped all the traffic in a certain street, should then solemnly write down in his notebook "The stillness in this street is highly suspicious." It can very easily be shown that the unselective chaos of images and momentary desires which introspection discovers is not the essential characteristic of consciousness. For consciousness is, from the outset, selective, and ceases when selection ceases. Not to prefer any one datum before another, not to attend to one part of our experience at the expense of the rest, is to be asleep: the process of waking, and after that of coming fully awake, consists in bringing selected elements into focus. When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

It reminds us of Aristotle's question - if water itself sticks in a man's throat, what will you give him to wash it down with? If a man blames port wine for being strong and sweet, or a woman's arms for being white and smooth and round, or the sun for shining, or sleep because it puts thought away, how can we answer him?

Quoted on June 30, 2014

After Blake, Milton criticism is lost in misunderstanding, and the true line is hardly found again until Mr. Charles Williams's preface.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

I think it is quite true that in some very important senses it is not a religious poem. If a Christian reader has found his devotion quickened by reading the medieval hymns of Dante or Herbert or Traherne, or even by Patmore or Cowper, and then turns to Paradise Lost, he will be disappointed. How cold, how heavy and external it will all seem! How many blankets seem to be interposed between us and our object! But I am not sure that Paradise Lost was intended to be a religious poem in the sense suggested, and I am sure it need not be. It is a poem depicting the objective pattern of things, the attempted destruction of that pattern by rebellious self love, and the triumphant absorption of that rebellion into a yet more complex pattern.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

[On the idea of an unfallen Adam, still existing today] To you or me, once in a lifetime perhaps, would have fallen the almost terrifying honour of coming at last, after long journeys and ritual preparations and slow ceremonial approaches, into the very presence of the great Father, Priest, and Emperor of the planet Tellus; a thing to be remembered all our lives. No useful criticism of the Miltonic Adam is possible until the last trace of the naif, simple, childlike Adam has been removed from our imaginations.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

The idea escapes the sensuality sometimes cast in Milton's teeth because the desire for total union, the impossible desire as it is for human lovers, is not the same thing as a desire for pleasure. Pleasure can be obtained; total interpenetration cannot, and, if it could, would be the satisfaction of love itself rather than of appetite.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

We shall be in constant danger of supposing that the poet was inculcating a rule when in fact he was enamored of a perfection.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

[Milton] delights in the ceremonious interchange of unequal courtesies, with condescension (a beautiful word which we have spoiled) on the one side and reverence on the other.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

I believe this to be a dangerous delusion. Children like dabbling in dirt; they have to be taught the stock response to it. Normal sexuality, far from being a datum, is achieved by a long and delicate process of suggestion and adjustment which proves too difficult for some individuals and, at times, for whole societies.
... The elementary rectitude of human response, at which we are so ready to fling the unkind epithets of 'stock', 'crude', 'bourgeois', and 'conventional', so far from being 'given' is a delicate balance of trained habits, laboriously acquired and easily lost, on the maintenance of which depend both our virtues and our pleasures, and even, perhaps, the survival of our own species. For thought he human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye) the laws of causation are. When poisons become fashionable they do not cease to kill.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

A fixed order of words is the price - an all but ruinous price - which English pays for being uninflected.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

A great deal of what is mistaken for pedantry in Milton (we hear too often of his "immense learning" is in reality evocation. If Heaven and Earth are ransacked for simile and allusion, this is not done for display, but in order to guide our imaginations with unobtrusive pressure into the channels where the poet wishes them to flow; and as we have already seen, the learning which a reader requires in responding to a given allusion does not equal the learning Milton needed to find it.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one. We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not. They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts that no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly proclaimed itself to be poetry. What is the point of having a poet, inspired by the Muse, if he tells the stories just as you or I would have told them?

Quoted on June 30, 2014

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

The misunderstanding of the genus (narrative poetry) I have learned from looking into used copies of our great narrative poems. In them you find often enough a number of not very remarkable lines underscored with pencil in the first two pages, and all the rest of the book virgin. The unfortunate reader has set out expecting "good lines" - little ebullient patches of delight - such as he is accustomed to find in lyrics, and though the was finding them in the first five minutes; after that, finding that the poem cannot really be read in this way, he has given it up.

Quoted on May 20, 2012

This is the wrong way of using this sort of poetry. It is not built up of isolated effects; the poetery is in the paragraph, or the whole episode. To look for single, 'good' lines is like looking for single 'good' stones in a cathedral.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

[A chapter headnote quotes from Traherne:]

"Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages and neglect to see the beauty in all kingdoms."

Quoted on June 30, 2014

We need most urgently to recover the lost poetic art of enriching a response without making it eccentric, and of being normal without being vulgar.

Quoted on June 30, 2014

First, as to Manipulation. I do not think (and no great civilization has ever thought) that the art of the retorician is necessarily vile. It is in itself noble, though of course, like most arts, it can be wickedly used. . . Both [Poetry and Rhetoric] do it by using language to control what already exists in our minds. . . It is honestly practised when the orator honestly believes that the thing which he calls the passions to support is reason, and usefully practised when this belief of his is in fact correct. It is mischievously practised when that which he summons the passions to aid is, in fact, unreason, and dishonestly practised when he himself knows it is unreason. The proper use is lawful and necessary because, as Aristotle points out, the intellect of itself 'moves nothing': the transition from thinking to doing, in nearly all men at nearly all moments, needs to be assisted by appropriate states of feeling.

Quoted on May 20, 2012

Music means not the noises it is nice to make, but the noises it is nice to hear. Good poetry means not the poetry men like composing, but the poetry men like to listen to or to read.

Quoted on May 20, 2012