Puritan or witty and profound idler? There’s no simple way to categorise the conflicted John Milton, says Joe Moshenska

It’s a parent’s nightmare. The eldest child, who went off to university full of grand plans and high hopes for the future, has returned lacking any sense of vocation or direction. The more he’s learned, the less sure he seems about what to do with his learning; all he knows is that he wants to read, and to write, but how to make this into a way of life is unclear.

During his studies, his parents moved to a quiet village a fair distance from London with the hope of enjoying some quiet in their advancing years, but now he has moved there with them, spending his days shut up in his room with his head buried in a book. Years go by with little to show for the hours and days squandered. He’s full of grand plans for the future, but seemingly incapable of making much of the present.

It would be easy to take this for a distinctively modern scene – a product of today’s dismal employment prospects for many young people, compelled to return to the family home if they’re fortunate enough to be able to rely on parental goodwill and financial support. But in fact this particular example is from the 17th century, and it demonstrates the potential value of aimlessness, of being able to explore and experiment without a concrete goal in mind.

The graduate in question, the young man lacking a vocation, was John Milton. The years spent back in his parents’ house would end with him writing the greatest short poem in English, Lycidas, and then setting off on a European tour where he would meet the astronomer Galileo Galilei. The reading he did would lay the foundations for the magnificent composition of his later years, the epic poem Paradise Lost.

These years of private reading would turn out to be far from squandered: this period of directionlessness produced in Milton a powerful, perhaps unparalleled, sense of direction and destiny. But would we or wouldn’t we call this an idle period?

In many ways Milton would seem like an unlikely figure through whom to understand the pleasures of idleness. The image of him that most people encounter, whether or not they read his poems, is that of the quintessentially grim Puritan, black-clad and unsmiling. Puritans loved to denounce idleness, especially because of the tempting pun on “idle” and “idol” – two sources of sinfulness united by sound. If Milton belonged to this party, he must have been the kind of person who saw life as a dour struggle in the service of God, a matter of unremittingly hard work.

In Paradise Lost, when Adam faces up to the prospect of leaving Eden and the harsh realities of a fallen life, he tries to console Eve with the thought that toiling in the dirt might not be all that bad: “With labour I must earn/My bread; what harm? Idleness had been worse.” We, and Eve, might reasonably respond: really? Life in Eden had plenty of idle moments, the necessary work of pruning its resplendent plant life punctuated by periods when the pair could recline on a soft bank and watch a lion dandling a kid goat in its paw, or, as Milton more daringly suggested, repair to their bower for some holy prelapsarian sex. Would more of this sort of thing after the Fall really have been worse than a future of tilling the dusty fields? If Milton thought in this way then an idle life seems, on his terms, to have been one barely worth living.

I think that this sense of Milton as cheerless, interested only in the difficult and the onerous, is also reflected in people’s sense of what it’s like to read him. I’ve found over the years that if I tell people I teach Shakespeare, their eyes light up – they often have genuinely pleasurable memories of reading and watching his plays. If I tell them I study and teach Milton, the reaction is often very different. Sometimes they’ll respond, as if it’s an admission of great guilt, that they’ve never read Paradise Lost, or that they’d read bits of it in school but never finished it; sometimes they’ll say sheepishly they always meant to read more, but there’s a strong sense of it being something that one should do, not a particularly alluring or exciting prospect. Mark Twain, giving an after-dinner speech in New York City in 1900, chose Paradise Lost to exemplify his classic definition of a classic: “Something that everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read”. A book that is read for work and not for pleasure; a writer whose works seem singularly unsuited for our idle moments, since he seems to have permitted himself few such moments.

If we take a broader view of Milton’s life and work, however, this picture of what he was like and what it is like to read his writings becomes significantly more complicated. I began this piece with Milton’s years of solitary undirected reading in the 1630s because during this period he lurches between extremes that are difficult to reconcile with one another. As I’ve already suggested, he careened in this decade from the quietest and most solitary to the most restless and convivial period of his life. Within a year of publishing Lycidas he was in Europe mixing with philosophers, scholars and politicians, and apparently having a lot of fun doing so.

At the end of the decade he travelled through France to Italy, taking in Venice, Naples, and Rome (twice), but finding himself most at home in Florence, where he became affiliated with two of the learned academies that had long proliferated in the city, the Svogliati – the listless – and the Apatisti – the apathetic. As their names suggest, while these gatherings were focused on the exchange of learned ideas (and Milton read his own Latin poetry before them, to considerable acclaim), such exchange took place within an atmosphere of light-heartedness and deliberate silliness. These were gentlemen’s dining clubs, fuelled by witticisms as much as by erudition. Sometimes members played games in which words with similar sounding first syllables were exchanged, or hosted lavish banquets with food-themed debates known as cicalate or “chats”, focused on culinary topics such as “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”; “In praise of salad”; and “On the similarity of watermelon and pork”.

Milton, despite his supposed dourness and his lifelong hatred of Roman Catholicism as the fount of all evil, was entirely at home in these surroundings, making friends with whom he was still corresponding a decade later as England slid into civil war. It was likely through one of these friends, Vincenzo Galileo – illegitimate son of Galileo Galilei – that Milton was able to meet the great astronomer, by that time aged and blind and under house arrest in his villa outside Florence.

Milton’s activities in his earlier years, then, thwart any attempt to characterise him in general terms, or to turn his life into a smoothly developmental narrative. Quiet retreat gives way to frenetic action; solitary study in an English village to Florentine idleness and indulgence. Even before he left for Italy, however, Milton was wrestling with the question of what counted as significant action, or as a life well-lived. He was keenly aware that it could look, from the outside, as if he were simply malingering, living a cloistered and self-indulgent existence without a clear sense of vocation. He wrote a sonnet marking his 23rd birthday which began, anxiously, “How soon hath Time the subtle thief of youth, / Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!” In it he acknowledged that he had as yet produced nothing of worth: “My late spring no bud or blossom showeth.”

He tried to console himself with the thought that “inward ripeness doth much less appear” – that he has been maturing, quietly and inconspicuously, and making progress towards his loftier goals of poetic greatness even when he doesn’t seem to have been. It’s a powerful and attractive defence of a certain version of what might seem like idleness – the need for periods of reflection and development, freed from the relentless pressure to be productive, to prove one’s worth before the time is right.

Milton would be drawn to versions of this idea throughout his life. Years later, in his famous and moving sonnet on his blindness, he lamented the loss of his sight and the passing of his years – “When I consider how my light is spent / Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide” – but would console himself with the thought that a life lived in patient anticipation, a life of seemingly unheroic readiness to seize the crucial moment when it finally arrives, a life that might appear unspectacular or even idle, is still eminently worthy: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

If at times he seems entirely convinced by this consoling thought, however, Milton was never able to stop worrying altogether. How could one tell the difference between a life being wasted or idled away and a life of patience and slow maturation? What if one chose not to rush or force things, and was then struck down before the chance to achieve anything had arrived? This was the fate of Edward King, who died young at sea, and whom Milton mourned in Lycidas. King’s horribly truncated life and unfulfilled potential proved that it can be just when we are on the cusp of achieving something, just when we “think to burst out into sudden blaze”, that death abruptly arrives, “the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears” who “slits the thin spun life”. Can we afford to be idle if life is this random, this fragile?

It’s worth looking at the whole of Milton’s life and of his writings in order to witness the extent to which he wrestled with these very real questions. What emerges is a Milton much less sure of himself, much less committed to grim productivity in everything we do, than the Milton of the popular imagination. This is a Milton who did allow himself time to idle, whether with his books or with his Italian friends, but never stopped asking himself about the value of the time he spent, and its place within the life he was living.

As I suggested above, when Milton came in Paradise Lost to imagine life in the Garden of Eden, he depicted a world in which the line between pleasure and work didn’t yet exist, and he made the distinction itself one of the horrible effects of the Fall.

In turn, when I look at his life and when I read his writings, it’s the sense of these boundaries being blurred that most interests me. When people suggest to me that reading Milton sounds like a lot of hard work, my response is never to claim that in fact it’s terribly relaxing, or a huge amount of undiluted fun. Rather, just as Milton himself lurched between action and inaction, between busyness and apparent idling, to read him is in my experience to veer from pleasure to strain, from leisure to work.

But it’s precisely this sense of change and surprise – of reading Milton as an experience that shifts from minute to minute, and is difficult to characterise in general terms – that I want to hold on to. Writing about the very different world of the 20th century, in words that I think still hold true today, the philosopher TW Adorno lamented the atomisation taking place “within each individual, between the spheres of his [or her] life”, and he blamed this on the rise of the unspoken rule, “Work while you work; play while you play.”

Milton might not seem like an obvious person to whom to turn when we consider the pleasures of idling; what his life and his work offer, however, are experiences that break this unspoken rule, that are difficult to categorise as work or leisure, that refuse this kind of atomisation. His example suggests that we might not always know whether what we’re doing counts as idling, or where it might end up taking us.

Joe Moshenska is the author of Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton. He is Professor of English at the University of Oxford. He previously taught at Cambridge and holds a PhD from Princeton. Moshenska is the author of three other books, including the James Tait Black Prize shortlisted A Stain in the Blood. He frequently appears on BBC radio as a New Generation Thinker and presented In Search of Milton’s Paradise Lost for BBC Radio 4. He lives in Oxford with his family.

This feature appears in the current issue of the Idler (March-April 2022) – out now.

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