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The American John MiltonThe poet and the power of extraordinary speech.

By Robert PinskyPosted Monday, Aug. 18, 2008, at 6:26 AM ET

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Is American speech plain, where Milton is fancy? Extraordinary or unidiomatic language represents the quality Ezra Pound denounces in ABC of Reading, where Milton exemplifies what Pound says poets should not do. Deriding Milton's line "Him who disobeys me disobeys," Pound says:

He is, quite simply, doing wrong to his mother tongue. He meant:
Who disobeys him, disobeys me.
It is perfectly easy to understand WHY he did it, but his reasons prove that Shakespeare and several dozen other men were better poets. Milton did it because he was chock a block with Latin. He had studied his English not as a living language, but as something subject to theories.

Here is an interesting, continuing conflict in American writing and culture: the natural versus the expressionistic, or simplicity versus eccentricity, or plainness versus difficulty. American artists as different as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams belong more or less in the "ordinary speech" category. On the other, "Miltonic" side of that division about word order in the mother tongue, consider the expressive eccentric Emily Dickinson, who in her magnificent poem 1068 ("Further in Summer Than the Birds") writes this quatrain about the sounds of invisible insects in the summer fields:

Antiquest felt at Noon
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify

In these lines, the natural and the mysterious become one, an effect arising not just from the words ("Canticle") but also from their order.

A spiritualized quality in the natural world appears in the morning prayer Milton gives Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. Their language is immensely different from that of Satan in syntax and idiom. Here is part of that Edenic, celebratory greeting to the day:

……..Ye Mists and Exhalations that now rise
From Hill or steaming Lake, dusky or grey,
Till the Sun paint your fleecy skirts with Gold,
In honour to the World's great Author rise,
Whether to deck with Clouds th' uncolour'd sky,
Or wet the thirsty Earth with falling showers,
Rising or falling still advance his praise.
His praise ye Winds, that from four Quarters blow,
Breath soft or loud; and wave your tops, ye Pines,
With every Plant, in sign of Worship wave.
………………................................………….(V, 185-194)

Much of the word order here is fairly plain and idiomatic, though Milton's muscular rearranging of the expected achieves its incantatory effect in the last sentence. Emphasizing the opening, ecstatic repetition—"His praise ye Winds"—and the final imperative of "in sign of Worship wave," Milton places that strong verb at the end of the line and sentence.

But up until that songlike moment, as Milton imagines his characters in a new world, he has them speak with a rather direct syntax. That appears to be a deliberate choice. In the lines introducing their prayer, Milton writes that Adam and Eve praise

Their Maker, in fit strains pronounc't or sung
Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence
Flow'd from their lips, in Prose or numerous Verse,
More tuneable than needed Lute or Harp
To add more sweetness ...

In Eden, "prompt eloquence" comes out of the humans "Unmeditated" in prose or verse and so sweet it needs no accompanying music.

The opposite is struggle. Post-Edenic struggle is the element in Du Bois' assertive, conclusive "not" and in Dickinson's sense of an unattainable, enigmatic presence in the sounds of nature in August. A stylistic equivalent for the struggles of imperfect mortals: That is part of Milton's still-accumulating achievement, palpable in his work and pervasive in our world.