This is an excellent essay by Mark Edmundson, so of course I am going to write about the part I disagree with:
I like to teach a class on Milton and Whitman. I do so from a political vantage, seeing Whitman as an archetypal progressive, a breaker of boundaries, an opener of new roads. Milton, by contrast, is an archconservative, someone who brilliantly dramatizes the allure of order, degree, and hierarchy. Few students have trouble entertaining Whitmanian values. What 20-year-old isn’t attracted to freedom? But with Milton, matters change. He believes that people can be happy only when they are installed in a hierarchy. We should revere what is above us and care for what is below. Milton’s views of hierarchy implicate religious, political, and family life. Reading these two poets side by side offers plenty of illuminating conflicts.
The problem with this account is that, while Milton indeed believed in “order, degree, and hierarchy,” he thought it essential to ask which order, which model of degree, which system of hierarchy a society embodies. Because he thought his own society had radically misconceived such matters, Milton was not an “archconservative,” but rather was a political revolutionary who advocated for and then defended the violent overthrow of the monarchy, and then worked for a decade in the new anti-monarchical government. Moreover, his theology was very much his own; though he never repudiated the Church of England and is buried in one of its churches, he could not have been ordained in it, and probably not in any other church either.
Whitman was a far more conventional figure than Milton. Though his poems were thought by some obscene, this was only by implication and suggestion, and in Whitman’s lifetime Leaves of Grass became a famous and celebrated work, despite its sensuality and its formal innovations. Whitman’s devotion to America and American exceptionalism was intense — he was a patriotic poet to a high degree, and famously the most eloquent celebrant in his time of Abraham Lincoln.
I am perhaps overstressing the point — in many respects Whitman was a new thing in the world. But what I am trying to suggest is that our categories of “conservative” and “progressive” do not map very neatly onto periods other than our own.
Some essays of mine that treat the issues Edmundson raises:
