Maggie Kilgour Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid . Maggie Kilgour. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. viii+373.
2013; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/673355
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Analyses
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeMaggie Kilgour Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid. Maggie Kilgour. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. viii+373.Kenneth J. KnoespelKenneth J. KnoespelGeorgia Institute of Technology Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMaggie Kilgour’s work bears importance for reading both Milton and Ovid. Within the terrain of English literary scholarship, it combines the tweezer work of the library with a forceful emphasis on the ways Ovid “grabbed the past and hurled it into the present and future, freeing it ‘for a continual process of poetical and political reinvention’” (xi).1 The book accomplishes a reading beyond moral traditions of interpretation that often doggedly follow the Metamorphoses and restores the trajectory of Ovid’s entire work. As Kilgour writes: “There is a polemic in this book therefore, concerning the dynamic nature of traditions and our own relation to the past. Milton’s Ovid is not the embodiment of ‘The Classical Tradition’—a compendium of fixed myths—but part of the dynamic process of reception in which we too are engaged as part of our own ongoing self-creation” (xix). Within the topography of philological study, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid also works as an annotated bibliography that follows the microcircuitry of research. Milton assimilates Ovid much as Ovid has drawn the legacy of Roman and Greek tradition. Kilgour’s “practical criticism” (xviii) poses, albeit indirectly, important questions about literary history itself: “The Renaissance Ovid is not simply a poet of the pure aesthetic or of the retreat into a fantasy world, but one whose poetry and life show that poetry cannot escape the world it inhabits” (162).Kilgour explicates Milton’s assimilation of Ovid in a trajectory that moves from “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough” to Samson Agonistes. But her discussion extends well beyond Milton and includes a steady reference to Elizabethan imitation of Ovid. Milton, she argues, transcends the earlier Ovidianism to shape a poetic monument that rests not on imitation but on a process of assimilation that shapes Milton’s very vision of his legacy. The initial chapters offer a double lens that first formulates an Elizabethan Ovidianism based on school imitation and then discovers the ways that Ovid provokes a vision of liberty: “Ovidianism becomes a means of imagining a new world order, freed from the shackles of inhibiting and artificial traditions” (103); “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Ovid is almost single-handedly responsible for English literature” (15). She devotes the central chapter of the book to the assimilation of Narcissus in Paradise Lost. She argues that Milton recasts the Narcissus fable. Rather than an isolated imitation in Eve’s creation scene, Narcissus offers a reflexive structure also revealed in God’s relation to Creation and Milton’s reflection in his own creation. Reforming the fable repeatedly shifts the story’s negative valence, and it becomes a means for affirming both God’s love for humankind and Milton’s own creative power. The book concludes with a consideration of Samson Agonistes as an expression of Milton’s transformation of his own mortality into a vision of poetic accomplishment that will live on through its own assimilation in poetry and history.An admonishment to read all of Ovid accompanies Kilgour’s commentary on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. The book reminds one of the prevalence of reading the early modern Ovid through moral commentaries that break fabulae into mosaic bits and render invisible larger configurations. Kilgour puts the Metamorphoses in play especially with Ovid’s Fasti and its reorientation of fabulae to the Julian calendar. In an effort to affirm a Romanitas, Caesar’s revision amounts to an effort to control time by inserting itself in “the control of daily life” (112): “Ovid explicitly recalled Augustus’ recent revision of the Julian calendar by which he had extended his control into the dimension of time itself” (116). The closing of the Society for Antiquities by James I in 1607 marks a similar intervention of the monarch into English life (152). Ovid’s Ex Ponto and Tristia provide their own reflection on the resilience of a poet and his work after exile. Kilgour reminds us that Ovid’s competition with Virgil may have contributed to Ovid’s exile (246).Kilgour’s close readings of English Renaissance literary history challenge scholars to give attention to French classical studies as well.2 There are also other “Ovids” that extend beyond the Ovidianism cited by Kilgour. The Ovidius philosophus, noted in medieval commentaries, also moves through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as Ovid’s work is drawn into the exploration of skepticism. For example, Donne’s transformation of Ovid in his Metempsychosis (1601) recognizes the presence of a “philosophical Ovid” as well. Kilgour’s strong advice to read Ovid’s Fasti could be complemented by another recommendation to read Ovid as a historicus. Precisely in the period discussed by Kilgour, Ovid becomes approached as a universal historian, as Michael Drayton and others demonstrate. The discussion of history in the final books of Paradise Lost is part of such technologies of historical representation. Kilgour’s reminder of the multiple “Ovids” in circulation challenges us to recognize Ovid’s larger presence. It is Milton’s complete assimilation of Ovid that Kilgour emphasizes: “While I do not believe that Milton is consciously trying to make himself into Ovid’s image, I think that his own situation inevitably calls up the shadow of the archetypal exiled poet, as had his early rustication in ‘Elegia 1’.…Like Ovid, he is attempting a reverse metamorphosis in which he turns what has become evil into good” (263).Kilgour’s “practical criticism” engages fully the philological study of early modern English poetry. While the parameters of her study are similar to those found in standard histories, she suggests that Milton himself has a role in shaping the literary history in which he fits. His own assimilation and transformation of Elizabethan Ovidianism challenges and invites a transformation that extends beyond himself. The reader’s role in this transformation is left somewhat up in the air. While Stanley Fish is recognized for arguing in Surprised by Sin (1967) for the paramount importance of Milton’s manipulation of the reader, Kilgour emphasizes that stress should be placed on the education of the narrator in Paradise Lost rather than on the reader: “For Fish, however, the target of corrections is not Satan but the reader. Milton creates a deliberate ‘programme of reader harassment’ and authorial correction which replays the story of the fall from error to ultimate redemption in the experience of reading” (260). Finally, it is difficult to see that Kilgour’s argument is much different than Fish’s: “While Fish focuses on the experience of the implied reader as the internalization of the fall, the poem itself offers the experience of the speaker who struggles against evil both outside and inside himself. The narrator himself is a more divided ‘complex, even unstable personality’ than Fish’s account implies” (260–61). Ultimately, Kilgour reiterates Fish’s emphasis on the reader as she stresses the blending of both poet and reader in Milton himself: “The meaning of poetry thus originates not in the author but in the reader. Talk about a reader-centered theory of interpretation—and one created by the author himself!” (289). It is hardly a coincidence that the editors of TLS have chosen to juxtapose a review of the recent books by Kilgour and by Fish. Rather than commenting on the juxtaposition in detail, TLS leaves comparisons to the reader.3While Kilgour’s reference to “practical criticism” indicates her caution before more theoretical approaches, it is evident that she is well aware that the questions she raises regarding influence have a theoretical impact on our own histories. Kilgour situates herself in a field of Renaissance literary studies that includes the generation of Douglas Bush, D. C. Allen, and M. C. Bradbrook and the more recent generation of Thomas Greene, David Quint, Angus Fletcher, and many others. Given her emphasis on Milton’s effort to stage himself for the future, there is also a resonance between Kilgour’s work and Gordon Teskey’s argument that “Milton represents a watershed in the seventeenth century, and therefore in the history of art in the West, in which the artist begins to play a new and unfamiliar role, as one who mediates spiritual power, like a shaman.”4 Kilgour’s work also understands that Milton represents a watershed: “By entering into a dialogue with past writers, responding to and rewriting their works, he set in motion his own future revision and metamorphosis by others” (327). It is to her considerable credit that she discerns Ovid’s substantial role in the metamorphosis of the landscape shaped by Milton. Notes 1Kilgour is quoting K. Sara Myers, “The Metamorphosis of a Poet: Recent Work on Ovid,” Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999): 196.2Cf. Simone Viarre, Ovide: Essai de lecture poétique (Paris: Société d’Édition les Belles Lettres, 1976); Hélène Vial, La métamorphose dans les “Métamorphoses” d’Ovide: Étude sur l’art de la variation (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010); Denis Knoepfler, La patrie de Narciss (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010).3Nigel Smith and Neil Forsyth, “Milton, Terror and Ovid,” TLS, October 19, 2012, 3–4.4Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 3February 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/673355 Views: 276Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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