> > Even Milton... not a particularly anxious
> > guy, I would have said.
>
> Of course not. He's the big strongman of the canon.
> It's the ephebes that are anxious.
I was kinda responding to Carrol's dating of the Age Of Literary Anxiety as starting with Milton.
Ole Johnnie was certainly deeply engaged with his predecessors, but for him the Classical writers loomed a lot larger than just about anybody in English. Well, Spenser maybe. So being the big strongman of the canon is a retrospective assessment -- quite accurate of course, and to my Miltophilic ears a very pleasing sobriquet. But the "canon" he intended to join starts with the Psalms and Homer, and some anxiety might have been justified, in company like that.
Yet on the first page of Paradise Lost he promises us "things unattempted yet in prose or rime."
Dryden? Pope? Swift? Addison? Johnson? None of these guys seems very anxious to me, though Johnson was a complete basket case about everything *but* his writing.
More I think of it, the Anx. of Infl. seems even more confined in literary history than Carrol made out. I don't remember Bloom's book well enough to argue with him, but the whole notion is starting to seem like a Modernist predicament, back-projected onto earlier writers.
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
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