"L'ALLEGRO, IL PENSEROSO", AND “THE CYCLE OF UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE"

Abstract

ABSTRACT The subject of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso is the experience of education as Milton conceived it. All his statements on education assume the ideal expressed in the Seventh Prolusion: to aspire to a time “when the cycle of universal knowledge has been completed.” This idealization of the humanist educational tradition leads Milton to reject as partial any education fettered by vocational goals. The apparent anomaly in the tradition, that a few “good writers” were thought to provide the total experience necessary to moral insight, anticipates Milton's representative and emblematic technique in the poems. Active Mirth and contemplative Melancholy divide experience between them. Within this frame, Milton identifies the educational experience that L'Allegro and Il Penseroso acquire as archetypal and ubiquitous. The temporal patterns, the natural images, and the cultural tradition which each observes provide the total experience and “immortality in the past” that Milton's educational theory promised. The particular experience of each figure emblematically represents all experience. The consequence for both is the harmonious poetic vision that Milton's ideal education constantly sought. One vision neither excludes nor includes the other. Two leaves of a diptych, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso together provide the picture of Milton's “cycle of universal knowledge."