Milton for Poet

Who best qualifies for the position of U. S. Poet? New England's Ralph Waldo Emerson and Long Island's Walt Whitman are doubtless the foremost candidates, with a few critics ranking California's Robinson Jeffers ahead of either. Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson are other candidates from New England. Carl Sandburg is the Midwest's best voice. Vachel Lindsay catches the whole jingle of American speech, and Stephen Vincent Benet caught last year's Pulitzer Prize. Last week at Columbia University a candidate for U. S. Poet was proposed who was no U. S. citizen, who never visited America or wrote about it, but whose works every schoolboy is supposed to know--John Milton.

For this candidate argued Dr. Denis Saurat of the University of London, visiting professor of English and French at the university's summer session: "The English poet is particularly fitted to express the ideals by which American people live because he unites the Puritan and the liberal traditions, selecting from the cultures of the past all the elements acceptable to American civilization. . . .

"England did not take Milton for its ideal because the poet belonged to a party. He was one of them, involved in their quarrels, and therefore refused by his opponents. . . .

"Milton is the man who gives the American people a legitimate philosophy which works in with the material civilization which is necessary for them.

"We believe the human soul has a value and that therefore the human being ought to be free. Milton stood out for this philosophy practically at the beginning and is still one of its best exponents.

"Summed up in a word. Milton's principles are 'liberty', the leading principle of American political democracy."

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