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COURSE SYLLABUS
The convention of invocation has undergone drastic changes since Homer's day. Discuss the development of this convention across three texts we've examined and explain the significance of any changes in the implementation of this convention.
The convention of invocation changes dramatically between Homer's day and Wordsworth's day. Whereas in Homer the rhapsode wishes to efface himself through the invocation, by Wordsworth's day he actually manages to become the epic hero of the story, so much so that, if there is a heroic act in Wordsworth, it is precisely the act of writing and speaking poetry. In different ways, Milton's invocation functions as a transition between the classical invocation of Homer and Wordsworth's variation on the theme, for Milton is already beginning to solidify the image of the poet in his various invocations. What lies behind this development is a change in the very understanding of the modern subject. Through his Christian epic, Milton already argues that the true heroic act lies in the refutation of temptation that everyone enacts throughout his/her daily lives.
Homer as a rhapsode is little more than a vessel through which the gods are expected to speak. We know little about him (indeed, we're not even sure if he wrote both the Odyssey and the Iliad or who his is exactly) because he never says anything about himself during the invocation. The reason for this is that, in an oral culture, the very concept of authorship has not yet been invented. A rhapsode was expected not to create something original but to repeat the many stories that had been repeated by thousands of other rhapsodes through the ages. He is a vessel through which the gods speak, though which all of oral tradition is expected to speak. To foreground his own identity would be an act of hubris against the gods.
Milton, on the other hand, is perfectly willing to foreground his own identity when he writes Paradise Lost. Given the small circle of literate people in the England of his day, the very act of signing his name to this work would lead to immediate recognition on the part of any Renaissance reader. Indeed, when he speaks of the trials and tribulations that he has suffered in his life (Bk III--invocation), any contemporary reader would automatically understand that he is referring to his involvement in Cromwell's rebellion, which eventually led to the execution of King Charles I. Milton also describes himself in Book III, painting himself as an old, wise, blind prophet figure. Hence, when he invokes the Muse, he asks that s/he "illumine what is dark" within him--a metaphorical request for wisdom but also a literal request for vision. The reason for this new foregrounding of the author is not only the invention of literacy, but also an associated revolution in the understanding of the subject. Both Cromwell's revolution against the king and the Puritan revolution against church hierarchy are moving towards the democratic notion that all subjects are inherently worthy, that government should represent the people and can be deposed if the people are unhappy, that each individual can approach God through a reading of scripture. Milton therefore takes the old machinery of Homer's epic (including, one could argue, the Muses) and banishes them to a Christian Hell. (Each of the demons represented in Bk II, for example, has a parallel in the pantheon of pagan gods in the Odyssey.) Instead, Milton asks a new Muse (the Heavenly Muse, the Holy Spirit) to "illumine" his own soul. Indeed, for this reason the true heroic act in Milton is a very personal one: Eve's struggle with her faith because of the temptations of her body and soul.
Wordsworth too effects a movement away from classical tradition and even away from Milton. Just as Milton argued that he would soar above the Aonian mount (the place of the nine Muses), so Wordsworth in the prospectus to the Excursion looks for the help of a Muse that would help him soar beyond one of Milton's muses, Urania. Indeed, in the Prelude's opening Book, Wordsworth presents no Muse at all. Wordsworth's new Muse will instead be Nature, and the mirror of nature in himself: his own soul, "an impulse to herself," as he states in the prospectus. Wordsworth could be said to take Milton's foregrounding of the author to an extreme in this way. In Wordsworth what becomes the subject of the epic is, as in Milton, the struggle of one's own soul. However, Wordsworth takes this a step further: suddenly what will become the subject of the epic is the very act of writing, and any individual's recollection of his or her own childhood memories, of his or her own run-ins with the eternal, the revelatory, the sublime. If one is to invoke a god by Wordsworth's day (which is to say after the fall of the monarchy, after the American and French revolutions, after Thomas Paine's Rights of Man ), then one will invoke not Homer's gods, not even Milton's God, but the godhead within oneself.