tive he remains sensitive to the relationship between himself as poet and his subject; he examines every implication of his creative act with a care which suggests a fear of self-delusion. While he insists on the pious intentions of what he undertakes, he never neglects to expose the satanic aspect of his poetic posture. (63-64)E. M. W. Tillyard has a much different reaction to the poet in Paradise Lost. In remarking on emotion in Milton's poetry, Tillyard comments, regarding Raphael's speeches,this is indeed angelic speech, and through it Milton conveys without strain or reservation his entire belief in the unity of creation and the informing power of God that both makes and preserves it. . . . Whatever we may think about Milton's direct descriptions of God, he does when writing of God's works make us feel, as no other English poet could, their glorious diversity, their order, their dependence on their creator who made and fosters them by the constant pressure of his inexhaustible power. (142-44)Surely this is not a description of a detached, objective poet. Arnold Stein is perhaps even more forceful in his comments regarding the poet in the poem:The poet we may see in the poem at this point is the figure of himself Milton could hardly have concealed had he wished to: that of the author whose representation includes his judgment. . . . The figure of the poet does not obtrude but still is present substantially, answerable to the literary and philosophical questions addressed first to the dramatized character who speaks, and through him to the 'living intellect' who creates and guides. . . . Throughout we know that behind the narrator there is a man with a personal history, which also enters the poem. (138-39)C. S. Lewis puts it another way: . . . every poem has two parents--its mother being the mass of experience, thought, and the like, inside the poet, and its father the pre-existing Form (epic, tragedy, the novel, or what not) which h...
