The Metaphoric Structure of Paradise Lost

Abstract

Despite earlier hints, such as Eliot's tercentenary warning that Donne's poetry might be "a concern of the present and the recent past, rather than of the future," 3 the effective end of t he Meta physicals' domination of taste can be demarcated, more sharply than is usual in such matters, at the publication of Louis L. Martz' Poetry of Meditation in 1954.Since then there has ap peared no new book of criticism concerned exclusively either with Donne or with the Metaphysical group.Rather, effort has been directed toward making those critical distinctions which would separate such contemporaries as George Herbert or Henry with the explicatory method in America.William Empson, the most talented and therefore most elusive of the pleiad of the thirties and forties, is an instructive exception.Primarily a textural rather than a contextual critic, he dealt extensively with Milton in Some Versions of Pastoral (New York, 1950; the original American edition (1938] bore the title English Pastoral Poetry), and brieHy in The Structure of Complex Words (New York, 1951).As I write, there is announcement of his forthcoming book titled Milton's God.Not only is Empson still very active, but he is the only man associated with the rise of the New Criticism who has seriously and extensively at tended to Paradise Lost.Cleanth Brooks followed Eliot in the post-1948 revaluation period with work chieHy on the early poems, but his point was not greatly instructive, i.e

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