The Poem as Thinking Machine

Fifty years ago, Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin indelibly transformed the terrain of Milton studies. It did far more. The book’s enduring contribution to literary studies is one of method: chapter after chapter reveals the inseparability of historical, philosophical, and aesthetic perspectives. Fish has never been primarily interested in the branching heterodoxies of Reformation theology or in the factional divisions of the Long Parliament, but well before the “religious turn” in literary studies, he demonstrated how the broader vocabularies of Reformation Christianity might highlight the same semiotic conundrums that would sound so fresh to us as filtered through French theory. Before one branch of historicism was branded “new,” Fish demonstrated the vivid way in which a historically specific ideological framework can sharpen, estrange, and revise our assumptions about authorial intent. At a time when all-the-new-thinking was marked by contemptuous disavowal of New Criticism, Fish staunchly demonstrated the foundational utility of close semantic and formal analysis: nothing can disrupt the critic’s bland inertias like a passage or a narrative feature that “refuses to work the way it should.” Finally, and I’ve no idea whether this was his conscious intention or not, Fish demonstrated why the interdependence of formal and philosophical problemsolving can nowhere be seen so vividly as in poetry.