The problem is that there are so many gradations in the association between a particular narrative voice and a particular writer. When Byron says something in Don Juan about learned wives being a drag, I think we're meant to think of Byron's biography, where we aren't necessarily when Milton addresses Eve. But Milton's address to Eve is strikingly more personal--makes one aware of a speaker whose whose feelings are engaged with the character--than Homer's address to Patroklos. The Milton-speaker is, after all, a representative human being whose life has been affected by Eve's fall--hence he is more closely linked to the historical Milton than Homer's narrator is to the historical Homer.
All these differ from Bert Hamilton's instance, in which you have a "distinct" character with whom Spenser has associated himself in other poems repremanding a second character in Book VI. I can't offhand think of any comparable instance in Renaissance writing, and it highlights how much Spenser was interested in placing versions of himself at the center of his poems. Bill Oram
>>> [log in to unmask] 01/04/01 12:37PM >>>
>John Leonard says: "Milton addresses Eve in his own voice at PL 9 404-7,
>partly to chide, but mostly to express his pity for her bad decision to
>work alone," apparently objecting to Bert Hamilton's phrase "well-known
>persona." I think Bert is correct. How can we know Milton's own voice?
>He died before electronic recordings.
>
>Yours, Bill Godshalk
Bill,
I did not intend to object to anything Bert Hamilton said. Maybe I just
missed the point. Sorry if this is so. I do, however, think that Milton
has a distinctive voice, with or without electronic recordings. Absurd to
suppose that the printed page can create a voice? I don't think so,
especially not after reading Eric Griffiths's *The Printed Voice of
Victorian Poetry* (OUO, 1989).
Yours,
John Leonard
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