ELH

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse.

W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Yeats”

In her introduction to a 1992 volume of critical essays on John Milton, Annabel Patterson points to Milton’s psychology and ideology of work as areas in need of our further attention. ¹ Her comment both reflects and anticipates the new visibility of labor as a subject of literary and cultural study over the last decade. With the 1985 publication of The Georgic Revolution, Anthony Low helped to bring the subject to our attention by reclaiming Virgil’s “middle term” from its relative eclipse in the shadows of pastoral and epic, re-initiating critical activity on a neglected genre. ² While Low’s project remained largely thematic and catalogic, a more local but theoretically ambitious contribution was made by John Guillory, in two essays on Samson Agonistes which, taken together, synthesize the historical problem of Protestant vocation with a stunning, eclectic mix of psychoanalytic, feminist, and materialist approaches. ³ In the same year as the Longman anthology, there appeared additional articles within Milton studies by scholars such as Marshall Grossman (from a Marxist perspective) and Leonard Tennenhouse with Nancy Armstrong (in a more Foucauldian vein), and these have been complemented by research done on labor in a variety of forms—intellectual and manual, alienated and freely chosen—outside the Renaissance as well, notably in the eighteenth century and Romanticism. ⁴ At the very least, the rise of an academic field which one Americanist has dubbed “work studies” suggests that if poets have suffered from an anxiety of indolence—from a scruple about what the fourth Georgic with some irony calls the artist’s “ignoble ease” (ignobilis oti)—then so, too, do the scholars who work on them. ⁵ [End Page 415]

Much remains to be done, however, and the interest continues, evidenced by panels and entire conferences devoted to issues of labor in language and literature. Patterson’s own comment came in the context of a recommendation to future psychoanalytic criticism, and while it is not ultimately a psychoanalytic reading that I will attempt, I do want to investigate the relation between work and something that we now relegate to psychology (but would have existed for Milton within theology and ethics): the passions, primarily feelings of sympathy and love. There are at the outset certain reasons for undertaking such an analysis. The vexed relationship between “labor” and “amor” is, I will argue, the central problematic of Virgil’s Georgics, which, as Low and others have demonstrated, is the main text available to Milton and other late Renaissance authors for considering and commenting on the activities of culture, with its root sense of cultus (or tending, cultivation). Moreover, there is the historical observation, receiving increased critical scrutiny at present, that the century and a quarter following Milton’s death witnessed a particular intimacy between the languages of labor and of feeling, when a text no less famous (or infamous) than The Wealth of Nations could be written by a Glasgow professor then known chiefly for his treatise on sympathy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The discourses of economics and aesthetics would remain for some time at best imperfectly differentiated, existing for most of the eighteenth century as twins emerging from the parent discipline of moral philosophy. ⁶

Yet it is, not surprisingly, Freud whose retrospect gives us one of the most vivid allegories of the relation between labor and love. It has by now become something of a critic’s commonplace to say that psychoanalysis is, as Stephen Greenblatt once put it, “the fulfillment and effacement of specifically Renaissance insights”—an observation that has the authority of Freud himself. ⁷ The maxim that the poets came first to his discoveries might seem particularly true when we read Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud offers his account of the vicissitudes of Eros, a figure that includes both fully “genital love” and “steadfast, affectionate feeling” or sympathy. “Civilization” (Kultur), Freud maintained, “is a process in the service of Eros” and constitutes, together with “the advantages of work in...