Chapter Three. Milton as Muse

What is to be sought is an activity that is both the restoration of god (the Mother) and the evolution of god (the formless, infinite, ineffable, non-existent), which can be found only in the state where there is NO memory, desire, understanding.

When Keats was on his Scottish walking tour the summer before Tom's death, gathering materials for poetry, in particular for his projected Miltonic epic Hyperion, he wrote to his friend Bailey that the first thing he intended to do when he got back was to “read that about Milton and Ceres and Proserpine”.2 The passage he refers to is marked in his copy of Milton's Paradise Lost, with the following note:

There are two specimens of a very extraordinary beauty in the Paradise Lost; they are of a nature as far as I have read, unexampled elsewhere—they are entirely distinct from the brief pathos of Dante—and they are not to be found even in Shakespeare. These are according to the great prerogative of poetry better described in themselves than by a volume. The one is in the following—“which cost Ceres all that pain”—the other is that ending “Nor could the Muse defend her son”—they appear exclusively

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Miltonic without the shadow of another mind ancient or modern.3

Both the Orpheus and the Proserpina myth are stories about the limited powers of the mother-child relationship on which the flowering of nature depends. In one the poet is separated from his Muse-mother and becomes vulnerable to the gangsterism of “the rout that made the hideous roar”, a poetry-killing noise; in the other the poetic spirit—the beautiful idea—is seized by the powers of darkness and withheld from the Muse to whom it belongs, though on a less damning, “seasonal” basis. They are well-known myths, part of received culture, yet Keats sees them as being about Milton and nobody else—Milton has retold them such that they form an organic part of his personal poetic history, “without the shadow of another mind”. Such stories only achieve their full impact