Milton, Language, Revolution

To get a proper sense of Milton in the English revolution we need to look not only at his work during the revolutionary period, but also at his early writings in the pre-revolutionary years, and at the mature works produced after the restoration. For years now the blandly disseminated view of the pre-revolutionary decades of the early seventeenth century has held that the works of English literature of those years belong to a non-political world. It was a depoliticization made possible by an unawareness of the extent and effects of censorship, and a consequent refusal to decode political meanings from the literary texts. But the revolution did not suddenly appear from nowhere. And if we look at Milton's poetry of the 1630s we can see evidence of the social tensions, and unmistakable assertions of revolutionary sentiments.

2015

Literary scholars have recently shown renewed interest in John Milton's unconventional religious and political thought. Milton was at odds with the dominant Protestant theology of his day. He believed that humans had free will, thus rejecting the central Calvinist doctrine that God predestined men for salvation or damnation. He also rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, claiming that Christ was not equal with God the Father, but rather a subordinate being. These departures from Protestant thought have considerable impact upon Milton's major poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. While scholars have explored the role of Milton's heretical thought, this study investigates how biblical typology deepens and augments the unorthodox nature of Milton's works.

Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2014

John Milton is doubtless one of the most important and influential poets in English Language and Literature. He has always been a major influence in literature both during his lifetime and after his death. His reputation among the readers and the poets is a known fact since it has been proven that several writers and poets frequently wrote under the influence of this great epic poet. Milton was an artist who had written about various subjects, he was both a poet and a renowned prose writer. As he had something to say about every field of life his admirers and followers were not necessarily from just one category. Many people, including politicians, poets, writers, composers found something valuable in Milton and his works. The purpose of this article is to reevaluate Milton's controversial works and lay down the influence of Milton on the mentioned figures of the period and aftermath.

Milton Quarterly, 2014

In Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation, Eric Song examines Paradise Lost (1667), Samson Agonistes (1671), Paradise Regained (1671), and, more briefly, late prose works such as The History of Britain (1670) and A Brief History of Moscovia (1682). Song believes that in these works Milton tries to answer questions arising from the Puritan commonwealth's end and the Caroline monarchy's return, from what Christopher Hill calls the experience of defeat: ''What underlying causes lead to the loss of a seemingly happy homeland?'' (2) and how can the homeland be recovered or a new one established? These questions lead Milton to confront the ''internally divided'' nature of created entities, the instability that results from the fact that ''a nation, a poem, or even a new world-must be carved out of . . . an original unruliness'' (2). The conflict between creativity and unruliness links Milton's political and mythic modes of thought and is the ''unified logic'' of his major work (3). Song explores this logic in four chapters: the first, on Milton's symbolic use of Tartars; the second, on colonialist discourse and Milton's use of country-house poetry in his depiction of Eden; the third, on Milton's ''evolving thoughts about Ireland'' and his depiction of Adam and Eve; and the fourth, on ''the politics of abjection and incorporation'' in his depiction of Samson and Jesus (15). Though this final chapter and parts of the first are influenced by Julia Kristeva's ''semanalysis,'' Song rightly describes his method as ''primarily historicist'' (15). The best parts of the book situate Milton's poetry and prose in its historical and cultural context while showing how the creativity-versus-unruliness dynamic connects his post-Restoration work. For example, in the chapter on ''Tartars''-a term that referred to ''a wide range of Turkic and Mongol peoples'' (19)-Song surveys medieval For permission to reuse, please contact

South African Journal of Philosophy, 2018

My first section considers Walter J. Ong’s influential analyses of the logical method of Peter Ramus, on whose system Milton based his Art of Logic. The upshot of Ong’s work is that philosophical logic has become a kind monarch over all other discourses, the allegedly timeless and universal method of mapping and diagramming all concepts. To show how Milton nevertheless resists this tyrannical result in his non-Logic writings, my second section offers new readings of Milton’s poems Il Penseroso and Sonnet 16: “On His Blindness”, along with his prose epilogue to his elegies (and thereby the entire collection entitled Poems). These readings attempt to show (1) the original admixing of philosophy and poetry (under the heading of “thoughtfulness”), (2) the shadow-hidden superiority of poetry in connection to the effeminizing disability of blindness, and (3) the potential irony of an apology that arguably suggests poetry’s superiority to philosophy. Finally, I rest my case for Milton’s rebellion by offering an interpretation of Paradise Lost which affirms the character of Satan qua dark, queer, poetic figure of classical republicanism.

Renaissance Quarterly, 2014

This learned, carefully pondered, and admirably lucid book combines some of the features of a scholarly monograph with those of a critical overview of Milton's greatest poem. Its monograph-like aspect derives from a focus on Milton's uses of structural and verbal allusion to his epic predecessors (principally, but by no means exclusively, Homer, Virgil, and Tasso) to signal the distinctive meaning and intention of his own poem. David Quint offers us a Paradise Lost that is shaped at every point by reminiscences of other poems whose shadowy "offstage" presence is intended to form a key part of an attentive reader's experience of Milton's text. Many of these presences are, as Gordon Braden notes in his dustjacket endorsement, registered for the first time, and thus constitute a repertoire of freshly observed source material which any future editor of Paradise Lost will need to take on board. The allusions cited by Quint, however, are not offered as piecemeal and discrete entities but are woven together to offer a cohesive overall interpretive account of Milton's poem. Quint's larger thesis is summed up briefly in the opening sentence of his Introduction: "The message of Paradise Lost is: make love, not war." Milton shaped Paradise Lost, Quint argues, by patterns of literary allusion that consistently signal its rejection both of the sternly moralistic implications of its biblical source material and of an epic tradition that had celebrated martial valor and imperial power, in favor of a new conception of heroism grounded in faith, marital love, and human freedom. Such an interpretive emphasis is, of course, as Quint himself frankly admits, not in itself new. The distinctive interest and value of his book, as he realizes, will depend on the detailed evidence and arguments that support his overall case. These turn out to be considerable. The first two chapters of the book concern Milton's depictions of the fallen angels in Books 1 and 2. Book 1, Quint argues, can be seen, at least in part, as a creative re-casting of Book 2 of Homer's Iliad, in which Satan proposes Odyssean guile as an alternative to the devils' failed military insurrection. The devils' newly built citadel, Pandaemonium, is figured, by patterns of biblical and classical allusion, as an epitome of imperial and ecclesiastical corruption, ancient and modern. The devils themselves are implicitly compared to the fictitious beings of fairy tale and chivalric romance. In Chapter 2, Quint maintains, Satan's persuasive eloquence and his progress from hell are closely aligned with Odysseus's voyaging-Satan's encounter with Sin and Death being shadowed by Odysseus's encounter with Scylla and Charybdis-while other elements of Odysseus are recalled, parodically, in the specious rhetoric of Belial and

Writing and Radicalism ed. John Lucas, 1996

The radical, revolutionary themes of Milton's Paradise Lost

2018

This essay reads the narrator's representation of the Son of God in heaven and Adam and Eve in Eden in the opening Books of Paradise Lost alongside the famous chain of similes describing Satan in hell – the so-called leviathan simile. In so doing it suggests that Milton's descriptions and similes are integral not just to the poem's style and narrative but to its theology, anthropology, and diabology. What someone looks like is an ontological issue in the poem; it tells us about the nature of the being described and how far they resemble its God. As we shall see, Milton's supernatural and prelapsarian beings are described in terms that accentuate their embodied visuality, a trait which valorises the material world and the sense of sight while suggesting that the division between the spirit and the flesh is not so absolute.

International Milton Symposium Bangor, 1995

International Milton Symposium, Bangor, 1995 (1): Synopsis of plenary paper, I will look at Milton's political and social radicalism in Paradise Lost. The issues examined include those of of how radical was Milton to write in English rather than in Latin; the thematic sub-text of England as spoiled Paradise; the rebellions of Satan and Nimrod from which a hierarchical, monarchical order was established; the rejection of ruling class definitions of radicalism as re-active, and Milton's redefinition of ruling class values as rebellions against the divine; Paradise as communist and free from commodity production and materialism; Paradise as vegetarian; Hellish technology as environmentally unsound; Satan and the drugs for arms trade; the rejection of militarism. (2): The paper It is often said that Milton took a radical step in writing Paradise Lost in English rather than in Latin. But the vernacular epic was well established by the seventeenth century and to have published a Latin epic would have been absurd.. One of the major projects of the English revolution had been to complete the access to major texts begun with the introduction of the English language Bible into churches. The publishing explosion consequent upon the breakdown of censorship in the 1640s resulted in the large scale availability in English translation of works previously restricted to the privileged elite educated in Latin. The radical aspect of Paradise Lost resides in the choice of theme and in the redefinition of epic values. The epic characteristically celebrated the tribal group or nation. A narrow, local patriotism informs the Iliad and Aeneid. Milton rejects that tradition, rejects divisive nationalism, and chooses the theme of the Fall. It is a foundation myth but what is founded is the human race, not a particular nation. And the focus is on the loss of Paradise rather than on the establishment of a dynasty. Milton had once considered writing an epic on King Arthur; but the collapse of the English republic and the restoration of the monarchy, the failure of the English revolution, made Milton disinclined to celebrate his native land. But as always with Milton, it is dangerous to make too dogmatic or simplistic an assertion. It is tempting to say that his choice of the theme of Paradise represents a refusal to write about Britain. At the same time, however, to write of Paradise was indeed to write of