[Milton-L] "Making Milton Matter"???? was Smokey Mountain...

[Harold Skulsky]

(1) “Defenses of poetry are seldom persuasive to anyone who isn't
already inside the
ramparts. Those persuaded don't need to be because they already are,
and
those who need to be persuaded will not be because the premises won't
be
intelligible to them.”

(2) “I stress that Milton is both really, really good and not
outdated because I hope to have 2-3 more
decades in academe.”

If I follow (1), it argues that there is no fact of the matter about
Milton’s value and therefore no such thing as being persuaded that
there is any such fact; to be “persuaded” that Milton matters, you
just place yourself, or find yourself already placed, within the
“ramparts” of a particular attitude community. 

If I follow (2), it argues that talk about Milton’s “real” value
is really self-interested talk about his market value put out by people
who owe their livelihood to selling him; if (2) didn’t mean this, it
would be pointless in the current context, because it is totally
irrelevant to the question on the table: how to bring home to students
that Milton has value. (A commodity doesn’t have to be valuable to be
salable, or salable to be valuable.)

The standard name for position (1) is nihilism. The standard name for
position (2) is relativism. Both are highly familiar, and indeed
currently dominant, views about various domains of “value.” (In
ethics, they are generally discussed under the umbrella of
“noncognitivism.”) In debates about literature, despite their
current prestige, they’ve been around for more than a century. They
have been refuted many times, but they always come back in various
covertly dogmatic forms. They are a badge of sophistication.

So prevalent are they at this cultural moment, that students generally
present themselves to us already saturated in both – walking the walk
if not talking the talk. For better of worse, most teachers of
literature are in the same condition, often without the slightest
awareness of it. (One is reminded of the bourgeois gentilhomme, who was
heartened to discover that he had been speaking prose all his live
without knowing it.)

This is no place to consider the validity of (1) and (2); but together
they are familiar symptoms of the unhappy cultural condition Durkheim
and Merton long ago diagnosed under the term “anomie.”  What should
concern people interested in the future of Milton is not only their
truth (they may yet turn out to be true) but their toxicity.