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MIKLÓS PÉTI
"I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructer that comes to me under the ward¬
ship of an overseeing fist. [...] Nay, which is more lamentable, if the work of any
deceased author, [...] come to their hands for licence to be Printed, or Reprinted,
[...] and who knows whether it might not be the dictat of a divine Spirit, yet not
suiting with every low decrepit humor of their own [...] the sense of that great man
shall to all posterity be lost, for the fearfulnesse or the presumptuous rashnesse of
a perfunctory licencer.”””
Here book licencers are compared to pupil-teachers (among whose chief tasks
must have been dictation to novices), and are explicitly set against the inspired
author who receives “dictates” from a “divine Spirit.” It seems then that for Mil¬
ton taking dictation, if received from the appropriate source, might be able to
invest with, or divest of authorship as well as authority. In the quoted instances
we might recognize traces of Milton’s later view on authorship in Paradise Lost
where, according to Lehnhof, the “desire to assert his authorial status is miti¬
gated by a reluctance to recognize any author aside from God.” On the basis
of the above excerpts and the actual text of the invocations, however, it seems
difficult fully to endorse Lehnhof’ argument that Milton “renounc[es] author¬
ity” and “effectively surrenders authorship to God, thereby stepping out of the
role of the rival-creator,”"* since the very act of receiving dictation form the
heavenly Muse at the same time endows the text of the epic with an authority
that manifests itself in Milton’s authorship (hence the frequent references to
the song as at least partly Milton’s intellectual property).’° It is perhaps not a
mere coincidence that the only other occurrence of the word “dictate” outside
the invocation to Book 9 in the text of the epic—Adam’s warning to Eve that
her Reason might “dictate false, and misinforme the Will” (9.355)—treats the
same problem of authority from a gendered perspective.
How should we conceive of the Muse’s “dictation” in light of the above? Tak¬
ing into consideration the facts that the narrator claims to receive dictation in a
quasi-unconscious state (slumbering), and that his blindness figures emphatically
in his poetic self-presentation, we can rule out the possibility that the verb in the
invocation to Book 9 refers to Milton’s composing of the epic in writing (which,
for all we know, never actually took place). Rather, we might find it helpful to
7 KERRIGAN, William — RUMRICH, John — FALLON, Stephen (eds.), The Complete Poetry and Es¬
sential Prose of John Milton, New York, Random House, 2007, 948.
18 LEHNHOF, Kent Russel, Paradise Lost and the Concept of Creation, South Central Review 21
(2004), 15-41, especially 34.
Cf. “my adventurous Song” (PL 1.13); “my Song” (PL 3.413); “still govern thou my Song” (PL
7.30); “if all be mine” (PL 9.46), etc.
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