Lewis, Preface to PL: Quotes, Ch. 4-7

Chapter 4 The Technique of Primary Epic

It is a prime necessity of oral poetry that the hearers should not be surprised too often, or too much.... A line which gives the listener pause is a disaster in oral poetry because it makes him lose the next line. And even if he does not lose the next, the rare and ebullient line is not worth making. In the sweep of recitation no individual line is going to count for very much.... You cannot ponder over single lines and let them dissolve on the mind like lozenges.... To look for single "good lines" is like looking for single "good" stones in a cathedral. - p. 21

The epic diction, as Goethe said, is "a language which does your thinking and your poetizing for you." ... The conscious artistry of the poet is thus set free to devote itself wholly to the large-scale problems -- construction, character drawing, invention; his verbal poetics have become a habit, like grammar or articulation. - p. 25

Chapter 6: Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic

Yet, on the other hand, so true an artist as Virgil could not be content with the clumsiness and monotony of a mere chronicle. His solution of the problem -- one of the most important revolutions in the history of poetry -- was to take one single national legend and treat it in such a way that we feel the vaster theme to be somehow implicit in it. He has to tell a comparatively short story and give us the illusion of having lived through a great space of time. He has to deal with a limited number of personages and make us feel as if national, or almost cosmic, issues are involved.... After Virgil and Milton, this procedure seems obvious enough. But it is obvious only because a great poet, faced with an all but insoluble problem, discovered this answer and with it discovered new possibilities for poetry itself. - p. 34

No man who has once read [Aeneid] with full perception remains an adolescent. - p. 37

That is the Virgillian note. But in Homer there was nothing, in the long run, to be unshaken about. You were unhappy, or you were happy, and that was all. Aeneas lives in a different world; he is compelled to see something more important than happiness. - p. 38

It is the nature of a vocation to appear to men in the double character of a duty and a desire.... - p. 38

This is the very portrait of a vocation: a thing that calls or beckons, that calls inexorably, yet you must strain your ears to catch the voice, that insist on being sought, yet refuses to be found. - p. 38

The result is that agonized parting in which the will remains suspended between two equal intolerables.

'Twixt miserable longing for the present land
And the far realms that call them by the fates' command (v, 656)

It will be seen that in these two lines Virgil, with no intention of allegory, has described once and for all the very quality of most human life as it is experienced by any one who has not yet risen to holiness or sunk to animality. - p. 39

But one thing is certain. If we are to have another epic it must go on from Virgil. Any return to the merely heroic, any lay, however good, that tells merely of brave men fighting to save their lives or to get home or to avenge their kinsmen, will now be an anachronism. You cannot be young twice. The explicitly religious subject for any future epic has been dictated by Virgil; it is the only further development left. - p. 39

Chapter 7: The Style of the Secondary Epic

The style of Virgil and Milton arises as the solution of a very definite problem. The Secondary epic aims at an even higher solemnity than the Primary; but it has lost all those external aids to solemnity which the Primary enjoyed.... The Virgilian and Miltonic style is there to compensate for -- to counteract -- the privacy and informality of silent reading in a man's own study. - p. 40

What I chiefly want to point out is something else -- the poet's unremitting manipulation of his readers -- how he sweeps us along as though we were attending an actual recitation and nowhere allows us to settle down and luxuriate on any one line or paragraph. It is common to speak of Milton's style as organ music. It might be more helpful to regard the reader as the organ and Milton as the organist. It is on us he plays, if we will let him. - p. 41

But look again and you will see that the ostensible and logical connexion between these images is not exactly the same as the emotional connexion which I have been tracing. The point is important.... But unlike the moderns he always provides a facade of logical connexions as well. The virtue of this is that it pulls our logical faculty to sleep and enables us to accept what we are given without question. - p. 42

The Miltonian simile does not always serve to illustrate what it pretends to be illustrating. The likeness between the two things compared is often trivial, and is, indeed, required only to save the face of the logical censor. - p. 42

Nearly every sentence in Milton has that power which physicists sometimes think we shall have to attribute to matter -- the power of action at a distance. - p. 43

When we have understood this it will perhaps be possible to approach that feature of Milton's style which has been most severely criticized -- the Latinism of his constructions. Continuity is an essential of the epic style. If the mere printed page is to affect us like the voice of a bard chanting in a hall then the chant must go on.... We must not be allowed to settle down at the end of each sentence.... we must not wholly wake from the enchantment nor quite put off our festal clothes. A boat will not answer to the rudder unless it is in motion; the poet can work upon us only as long as we are kept on the move. - p. 45

The sequence drowsed -- untroubled -- my former state -- insensible -- dissolve is exactly right; the very crumbling of consciousness is before us and the fringe of syntactical mystery helps rather than hinders the effect. - p. 47

While seeming to describe his own imagination he must actually arouse ours... We are his organ: when he appears to be describing Paradise he is in fact drawing out the Paradisal Stop in us. - p. 49