Bret van den Brink

Ph.D. Student, Department of English

Milton’s Modernisms; Or, Wallace Stevens’ Cavalier Chevaliers 

“[T]he Civil War of the seventeenth century, in which Milton is a symbolic figure, has never been concluded,” so T.S. Eliot declared in “Milton II.” Eliot announced his own allegiance in the dispute between the Royalists or Cavaliers on the one side and the Parliamentarians or Roundheads (Milton’s faction) on the other, when he professed himself “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” As a symbolic figure, Milton inverts the Eliotic triad – he is proto-Romantic, republican, and Protestant or even heretical. Eliot’s antipathy (shared by Ezra Pound) towards Milton continues to dominate our understanding of Modernist poetry’s reception of Milton. 

This paper presents Wallace Stevens as offering a contrasting stream of Milton’s reception in the period. Stevens’ anti-Eliotic, Miltonic positioning emerges through his use of variants of “cavalier” in “Mrs. Alfred Uruguay” (a response to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), where the inspired poet is explicitly not a “chevalere” though he is a “rider” or caballarius, and “In the Element of Antagonisms,” where “Birds twitter pandemoniums around / The idea of the chevalier of chevaliers.” “Pandemonium” is Milton’s coinage, and the “chevalier of chevaliers” (cf. Rev. 19.16) suggests a Romantic reading of Milton’s God as a bit too redolent of the Stuarts.  

Ethan Gibson

Ph.D. Student, Department of English

“As Someone Somewhere Sings”: Joyce’s Use of Milton

This presentation reevaluates the influence of Milton on Joyce’s fiction and thereby opens a broader reconsideration of Milton’s twentieth-century reception. While Homer and Shakespeare are obvious resources for Joyce, his use of Milton has been mostly ignored. In response to the few critics who have considered this problem, I aim to better contextualize and interpret the allusions to Milton’s poetry and prose in Dubliners and Ulysses, identify Joyce’s implicit rewritings of Milton, and ultimately focus on how, why, and to what extent Lycidas and Paradise Lost may be recognized as key influences on Joyce’s understanding of cultural mediation. I contend that the relative marginality of Milton in Joyce’s work belies a deeper, less obvious engagement with Milton’s own techniques for incorporating a diverse set of models and influences into an epic form, be it poetic or novelistic. Northrop Frye writes of Lycidas that “Milton presents the poem as, in a sense, contained within the mind of the poet.” This, I suggest, Joyce learned from Milton, and my analysis of how Milton was an enabling influence, and not merely an antagonist for Joyce’s fiction, invites us to reconsider the hostility to Milton of Joyce’s fellow modernists, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.