Milton's Life Research Articles

NicholasMcDowellPoet of Revolution: The Making of John MiltonPrinceton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2020. xvi + 485pp. ISBN 13: 9780691154695. $35.00 (cloth).

NicholasMcDowellPoet of Revolution: The Making of John MiltonPrinceton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2020. xvi + 485pp. ISBN 13: 9780691154695. $35.00 (cloth).

Revisiting John Milton: A Thematic Exploration of Selected Poems

The study aims at analyzing the poetry of John Milton who is an important poet of the sixteenth century English literature. It explains the period in which the poet appeared, namely the age of Renaissance in English literature. It also sheds light on his life, and his writing which its importance can be found within. It focuses on his epic "Paradise Lost" as an example of his literary ability in creativity.
 The study aims at shedding light on Milton's life and his great works and failure ones as a trial to what is going on in the mind of a famous English poet like John Milton.

Refining the Sublime: Edward Phillips, a Miltonic Education, and the Sublimity of Paradise Lost

ABSTRACT Edward Phillips is central to our understanding of Milton's life due to his role as lead amanuensis during the composition of Paradise Lost. Yet Milton's nephew has long been considered a failed product of his uncle's educational method. This article recovers the intellectual dimension of Phillips's literary and publishing activities and their neglected place in the reception of Paradise Lost as sublime. Enduring claims that Phillips was a Cavalier renegade to Miltonic principles and inveterate plagiarist are shown to be of less interest than how he can be seen to have applied the methods in which he had been schooled.

Refining the Sublime: Edward Phillips, a Miltonic Education, and the Sublimity of Paradise Lost

ABSTRACT Edward Phillips is central to our understanding of Milton's life due to his role as lead amanuensis during the composition of Paradise Lost. Yet Milton's nephew has long been considered a failed product of his uncle's educational method. This article recovers the intellectual dimension of Phillips's literary and publishing activities and their neglected place in the reception of Paradise Lost as sublime. Enduring claims that Phillips was a Cavalier renegade to Miltonic principles and inveterate plagiarist are shown to be of less interest than how he can be seen to have applied the methods in which he had been schooled.

The Archetype of Revolt in John Milton's Paradise Lost

John Milton (1608-1674) was one of the main advocates of the reform policy initiated by Oliver Cromwell in England. The texts written by him during the conflict between the Parliament and the King determined the new Republic to offer him high-ranking positions. In the last part of his life, however, after Charles II restoration, Milton fell into the disgrace of the new king. It is the period of time when he wrote the great epic poem Paradise Lost, published in a first edition in 1667 and consisting in ten books. The present paper aims to capture the way Milton developed a theory on the right to rebellion in his poem Paradise Lost. Using the instruments of a psychoanalytic approach, we want to capture the archetype of the revolt, revealing the deep meaning of the concrete history in which it is projected. For Milton, rebellion is justified. This idea was later confirmed by John Locke as the right to rebellion in The Second Treaty on Governance. For Milton, revolt is an archetype, but for Locke it becomes a true philosophical concept. Milton's main hero, the fallen angel Lucifer, becomes an archetypal symbol for the spirit of revolt. However, the text was meant to provide its creator with rehabilitation in front of the Crown, who finally recognized his genius. Using psychoanalysis, we identified subtle links between Milton's life and his work. We can even consider that Milton's life and his work intertwine; they are one and the same thing.

The development of Milton's thought: law, government, and religion

Although these two books both address Milton's thought, their divergent purposes and audiences substantially distinguish the utility of their respective studies of Milton. The Development of Milton's Thought unquestionably works as a scholarly text, aimed at scholars and students of Milton and intended as an attack on idolatrous readings of Milton. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought approaches Milton biographically, tells a life story of potential interest to a wide audience and addresses Milton's developing thinking as part of that story. Shawcross takes a distinctly textual approach to Milton's thinking, though he does not ignore history; Campbell and Corns address poetry and prose as part of their larger historical project to examine Milton's life. I found the biography offered a clearer glimpse of Milton's changing thought across his lifetime, while Shawcross' volume is most effective as a corrective to scholarly bad habits in reading Milton's works and life. The Development of Milton's Thought opens by establishing the conjectural Milton too often taken as a given by scholars, a Milton of fixed thought and resolved purpose throughout his life and career. Shawcross spends the rest of the book in a careful and nuanced critique of this fictional Milton, sometimes taking pains, as Milton did in Eikonoklastes and other texts, to smash the idolatrous image of Milton, man of vision and proto-Republican. As Shawcross notes, Milton's poetry and prose offer evidence to changes in his understanding. Shawcross also finds it vitally important that critics of Milton retain their critical faculties in the face of his persuasive and powerful writing, arguing convincingly that scholars must neither work as apologists

The Arms of the Family: The Significance of John Milton's Relatives and Associates by John T. Shawcross (review)

MLR, 100.2, 2005 485 In Chapters 3-5, Alfar considers in turn the sisters in Lear, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra. Goneril and Regan, she argues, are trapped by the pressures on any mon? arch in this period: ifthey behave like tyrants it is because all early modern monarchs are forced by their situation to behave like tyrants on occasion. Lady Macbeth is a differentand altogether more interesting case: in the book's strongest chapter, Al? far argues that Lady Macbeth is a parodic version of the perfect early modern wife and helpmeet. Finally, Alfar considers the case of Cleopatra, who is both admired and abused, making use of the point established earlier in her analysis of Julietand discus? sion of Elizabeth I. The book concludes with a chapter on the women in The Winter's Tale and a reading of that romance suggesting that Shakespeare was seeking a way of reconciling the irreconcilable in his culture. A short conclusion summarizes the discussion and points to other examples of works that create and punish female evil. One of the most attractive features of this study is Alfar's enthusiasm and convic? tion. She works hard to express the complex ideas of others in clear and simplified language. The study does seem rushed, however, not only when she omits the women of the histories, but also when she tells us she uses the conflated text of King Lear, although 'Clearly, a study of the differences would yield fascinating results for my argument' (p. 206 n. 8), because she will perform that task in a longer study yet to come. The omissions are unfortunate because they suggest that her scholarly project is at times too simplified. University of Georgia Frances Teague The Arms of the Family: The Significance ofJohn Milton's Relatives and Associates. By John T. Shawcross. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2004. vii + 304 pp. $45; ?3195- ISBN 0-8131-2291-0. The life of John Milton can hardly be described as a neglected area of literary scho? larship, and yet in this excellent and informative book, John T. Shawcross presents a wealth of new material on the subject. His overriding argument is thatfamily mat? ters do matter and that some of Milton's key family relationships have been either neglected or misread by Miltonists in the past. So Shawcross gives extended and detailed attention to familial figures?in particular Milton's brother Christopher, his brother-in-law Thomas Agar, and his two nephews John and Edward Philips?not given sufficientlyfull consideration in other biographies. The book has three main lines of attack: the addition of a large amount of scholarly work to the field of Milton studies; a revisionist reading, in the light of this new information, of Milton's life and associations, particularly in relation to political and religious matters; and, in a final chapter, an attempt to relate this new family-oriented life to the literary Milton. The book is extremely successful in the firsttwo of these objectives, and also achieves the third, even if the final chapter?'Protestant and Familial Literary Implications'?is perhaps more of an interesting afterthought than a triumphant crescendo. What is particularly impressive about this book is how, in boldly revisionist, almost iconoclastic mood, Shawcross repeatedly reveals that in Milton studies 'received notions passed down from one commentator to another' (p. 2) have often been inadequate and sometimes simply false. The book proceeds in an orderly fashion, devoting self-contained chapters to its main protagonists, and there is a welter of new information about each. For instance, we learn in greater detail than ever before the importance of Royalist figures such as Thomas Agar (the second husband of Milton's sister Anne), Christopher Milton, and Edward Philips, and Shawcross argues that these people, and other 'well-to-do [. . .] "significant" people of England' (p. 163), were absolutely central to Milton's milieu . Shawcross convincingly speculates, forexample, that it is these connections that 486 Reviews helped Milton escape punishment afterthe Restoration, and this serves to modify the traditional narrative, which stresses the importance of political allies such as Andrew Marvell. Shawcross argues?in one of the more powerful strands in the book?that it...

Companions with Time: Milton, Tasso, and Renaissance Dialogue

??? COMPARATIST COMPANIONS WITH TIME: MILTON, TASSO, AND RENAISSANCE DIALOGUE W. Scott Howard Hence loathed Melancholy Of Cerberus, and blackest Midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy, Find out some uncouth cell, Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings; There under ebon shades, and low-browed rocks, As ragged as thy locks, In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.1 (John Milton, "L'Allegro," 1-10) Hence vain deluding Joys, The brood of Folly without father bred, How little you bestead, Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys; Dwell in some idle brain, And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess, As thick and numberless As the gay motes that people the sunbeams, Or likesthovering dreams The fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train. (John Milton, "Il Penseroso," 1-10) Can one identify a work of art, of whatever sort, but especially a work of discursive art, if it does not bear the mark of a genre, if it does not signal or mention it or make it remarkable in any way? 0acques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," 64) Since their side-by-side debut in Poems ofMr. John Milton Both English and Latin Compos'd at several times (1645), Milton's well-loved 'twin' poems "L'Allegro" (i.e. 'the cheerful manO and "Il Penseroso" (i.e. 'the contemplative man') have raised questions about their generic characteristics . Readers have not unreasonably sought to affiliate the texts with an apparently inexhaustible array ofartistic forms, themes, and cultural discourses.2 This aporia concerning the companion poems' situation within and against identifiable literary conventions affirms at least one important point: that "L'Allegro" and 'Tl Penseroso" constitute (both separately and together) a hybrid genre. Given such professed indeterminacy as well as their widely acknowledged metrical and tropological mirroring ofone another,"L'Allegro" and "? Penseroso" remarkably have not yet been examined in relation to the one Renaissance literary form that Vol. 28 (200V: 5 COMPANIONS WITH ???? epitomizes both the mixing ofgenres and the dramatization of intertextuality : the dialogue.3 Although a complete analysis ofMilton's companion poems as hybrid texts lies beyond the scope of this article, I propose to investigate their participation in a tradition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English verse dialogue informed by Torquato Tasso's foundational "Discorso dell'arte del dialogo" (1585), an essay with which Milton was familiar. The details of Milton's life and works provide ample evidence of his esteem for Tasso4, whose influence (from the 1630s onwards) was significant and has been studied at length with regard to the poets' respective ideas about the heroic epic, the pastoral mode, and the heroic sonnet, but not concerning Renaissance dialogue.5 Comus (1634), for example, owes a considerable debt to Tasso's pastoral drama, Aminta (1573), which may have also influenced Samson Agonistes (1671). The origin of the twin poems6 has been placed as early as 1629 and as late as 1638, which suggests that "L'Allegro" and "? Penseroso" could indeed have emerged from a pivotal moment in Milton's career when he was reading and responding to Tasso's works. At least one early modern text—a dialogue ofthe dead published in 1762—emphasizes Milton's affinity for Tasso's dialogues: H Tasso. A dialogue. The Speakers John Milton, Torquato Tasso. In which, New Light is thrown on their Poetical and Moral Characters (Keener 285). According to C. P. Brand (205-308) and Cames Lord and Dain A. Trafton, Tasso's dialogues and accompanying discourse on the genre were very popular texts "throughout Europe during [his] lifetime and well into the seventeenth century" (9). Jon Snyder claims that Milton "is Tasso's most legitimate literary heir" and that "seventeenth-century theorists of dialogue took his work as a common point of departure" (183). Many of Milton's readers have understood his companion pieces as autobiographical self-fashionings that reflect the young poet's inevitable choice between secular and sacred realms ofexperience. Louis Martz, for example, holds that the poems "develop a linear, sequential effect, moving from youthful hedonism toward the philosophic, contemplative mind" (46)—an interpretation both resilient and widely influential. Such views, however convincing on their...

Drilling Down and Building Up

If you drill down far enough into any phenomenon, eventually you get to physics. Unless you hold that some phenomena lie outside nature, you pretty much have to accept that. It is the building back up, inferring the whole from its parts, that is terribly difficult and that many will say is impossible, at least across certain boundaries. Start with Milton and ifyou dig down you get to Milton's brain. Drill into it and you get to what Hofstadter (1985) described as billions of in-themselves-meaningless neural firings (p. 649). Below that you get to Milton's DNA, and so on down. What is the prospect of building up from these lower levels to anything like an explanation of Paradise Lost? Do we not have to start a new page, taking the neural substrate as given and not very informative, recording instead the events and circumstances of Milton's life and whatever we can infer about his thoughts, beliefs, and feelings? No, say Dennett and Wilson in the monumental works under review. Both, in different ways, are about continuity across levels. Wilson says it in his title: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. The closest synonym for consilience, ac-

Romola and Milton: A Cultural History of Rewriting

George Eliot's novel of fifteenth-century Florence, Romola, represents her struggles with both the history of Western culture and her real and literary fathers by reimagining Milton's life and thought. As heir to both Renaissance humanism and Reformation zeal, as a central historical link between fifteenth-century Florence and Victorian England, as the patriarch of English letters, and as the father of rebellious daughters, Milton is the unacknowledged father in Romola, and the stories of his family are woven into the fabric of the novel. Recovering the cultural history of these stories-retold by biographers for two centuries and fictionalized throughout the nineteenth century-allows us to historicize and expand Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's insight that Milton is present in Romola, but also to confute their widely accepted conclusion (quoting Harold Bloom) that Milton was for Eliot, as for other women writers, "the great Inhibitor, the Sphinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradles."

John Milton: the self and the world

The facts of John Milton's life are well documented, but what of the person Milton -- the man whose poetic and prose works have been deeply influential and are still the subject of opposing readings? John Shawcross's different biography depicts the man against psychological backdrop that brings into relief who he was -- in his works and from his works. While the theories of Freud, Lacan, Kohut, and others underlie this pursuit of Milton's self, Jung and some of his followers provide the basic understanding by which Shawcross places Milton in the panorama of history. His explorations of the psychological underpinnings of Milton's decision to become poet, of the homoerotic dimensions of his personality, and of his relationships with father and mother demonstrate the extent to which psychobiography proves itself invaluable as means to appreciate this complex writer and his complex writings. This biography combines the traditional chronological narrative with technique akin to that of fiction, a mixture of times and triggering of remembrances from various time frames without time differentiations. Such an approach offers view of Milton not only in being but in process of being. Shawcross's examination of two current concerns, gender attitudes and political ideologies, ranges Milton's work against the self he exhibits. Specialists and nonspecialists alike will find in this magisterial biography wealth of new insight into one of the greatest of English poets.

ABSTRACTS

Sheila T. Cavanagh. “Battles of the Mind and Body: Rational and Sensual Seduction in Spenser and Milton.”Stephen M. Fallen. “Milton's Augustinian Allegory.”Albert C. Labriola. “‘God Speaks’: Milton's Dialogue in Heaven and the Tradition of Divine Deliberation”Roger Lejosne. “John Milton et Les Voies de Dieu.”John Shawcross. “Interferences of the Self: Mother Fixation and Milton's Life and Work.”Sara Thorne‐Thomsen. “Epic Continuity: the Lyric Epithalamia in The Aeneid, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost.”John C. Ulreich, Jr. “Making Dreams Truth, and Fables Histories: Spenser and Milton on the Nature of Fiction.”

Distant Genius: Johnson and the Art of Milton's Life

Previous articleNext article No AccessDistant Genius: Johnson and the Art of Milton's LifeStephen FixStephen Fix Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 81, Number 3Feb., 1984 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391306 Views: 2Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1984 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Gary Kuchar Milton, Shakespeare, and Canadian Confederation: Thomas D’Arcy McGee as Literary Critic, University of Toronto Quarterly 88, no.11 (Mar 2019): 1–23.https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.88.1.01Greg Clingham Johnson, Writing, and Memory, 1 (Sep 2009).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511484148

Teaching Milton's Early Poetry

TEACHING MILTON'S POETRY raises difficult problems. More than the work of most literary figures, Milton's poetry demands a familiarity with its literary, cultural, and historical milieu. A knowledge of classical mythology, Christian theology, Puritan controversy, and seventeenth-century history is often central to an understanding of Milton's work, and, as every teacher of Milton knows, today's students rarely come to a Milton course with such background. Another teaching problem results from Milton's reputation. Not only do most students consider Milton a difficult and a remote poet, but they also think of him as a Puritan. For them, all too often to be a Puritan is to be a religious fanatic, a kill-joy, or, worst of all, a sexual prude. More serious than either of these problems is that of aesthetic taste. Milton is a master of the long poem; we live in an era that values short poetic forms and fiction. Milton is a lover of ornamentation; we live in an era that favors directness in style. Milton is a writer of grandiloquent poetry (my students pejoratively refer to it as flowery); we live in an era that prefers simplicity and understatement. Milton is a skilled user of the remote, the impersonal, the public voice; we live in an era that values the psychological, the personal, the private voice. And Milton is an experimenter in genres that are no longer viable today-the descriptio, the classical pastoral, the court masque. The least accessible of all of Milton's poetry, it seems to me, is the early poetry, for whereas Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes have narratives, psychological concerns, and thematic issues which interest the contemporary student, the earlier poems seem more remote, more ornate, and less obviously relevant to students today. The first time I taught a course in Milton, in the fall of 1975, I became painfully aware of these problems and how they interfered with the students' enjoyment and understanding of Milton's work, especially the early poems. In that course, I took a fairly standard major author approach to Milton's art, an approach patterned after my own undergraduate Milton course. I began by delivering introductory lectures on Milton's life and on seventeenth-century historical and philosophical background. I then assigned the early poems in their chronological order of composition, beginning with On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough, and gave traditional close readings of these short works before moving on to Paradise Lost. The results of this thorough, well-researched, tightly-organized approach were poor at best. Although the better students were interested, involved, and learning, the majority of

The Miltonic Future

The business of our Association is with Research in all the modern languages and literatures from today backwards as far as the first linguistic data about any of them are accessible. We are concerned with the past and not with any waves of the future. Our disciplines and courses as I overheard a student on the dark campus of the University of Wisconsin sigh to a group who happened to be passing me on Bascom Hill a few months ago are tied to the past though many of them are officially described as 'contemporary'. 'Literature', he said, 'is as much tied to the past as history.' I would not dispute his thesis, though I am quite ready to agree with those historians who regard their subject as a science exact enough to make some kinds of prediction possible. Of course, we too have our historical disciplines the languages, the historical aspects of aesthetics, and the common ground which we share with historians of ideas. All these have contributed to what we know about Milton and to our multilateral curiosity about him, upon which the Miltonic future largely depends. If for a short future of a few years I predict a persisting excitement over some of our frustrated curiosities about Milton and his major poems, I hope that I shall not be accused of forgetting that literary history and criticism are not exact sciences, or reproached because our best biographical work has failed to assure us of anything like definite dates for the years when Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes were written. In his magnificent edition of Paradise Lost1 Alastair Fowler says that we know nothing more about the time of its composition than is to be gathered from Thomas Elwood's report of having seen the finished manuscript in 1665, and from the concurrence of the early biographers, Edward Phillips and John Aubrey, about Milton's way of writing at night or early dawn in impulsive runs of sometimes as many as twenty to forty lines, mainly through the winters of I658 to 1663. We are still less secure about our attempts to date the other two major poems. Among the many questions about Milton's life to which we still have no sure answers W. R. Parker's Biography2 lists the mysteries of the dates of their composition and of the lapses of time between those dates and that of their publication in 167 . For Samson Parker was most attracted by I647 'as the time when Milton wrote a moving drama

Form and Content in Milton's Latin Elegies

NEO-LATIN POETRY has often been overlooked in modern discussions of an author's work, perhaps because it is usually characterized as conventional. And since most of Milton's Latin poems were written before he left Cambridge in 1632, they are also often dismissed as mere youthful exercises. True, a few commentators have observed his modifying and reworking the old material to suit the literary forms of his own time and the need of his own personality.' These commentators have generally stressed the biographical value of Milton's Latin verse rather than its poetic merit or its foreshadowing of the great English poetry to come. It does enhance our knowledge of Milton's life, but it also has literary meaning and worth. The Latin elegies, which are among the earliest poetic works, are a case in point. Milton published seven Latin elegies in the first edition of his minor poems in 1645 under the general heading Elegiarum Liber Primus, along with eight other brief poems. Most scholarship over the years has been concerned with the dates of composition (from April 1626 to December 1629 or May 1630, depending upon the date of the seventh elegy), literary allusions and sources, or topical references and biographical matter.2 In this paper I look at these elegies as literature and thus as precursors of the future greatness. For when examined past the customary nod, they herald the poetic themes, the ideological theses, and the mythic concepts of Paradise Lost. The form of the elegies is easy to describe: they are poems of varying lengths composed of a series of elegiac distichs (or couplets), each consisting of a line of dactylic hexameter and a line of dactylic pentameter. This

Metaphor in Samson Agonistes

This essay attempts to show that metaphor, in a broad sense of the term, plays a more basic role in Samson Agonistes than critics have allowed. The broad sense includes both "imagery," which is the usual sense, and "symbolism." Both of these involve a comparison of A to B that defines a quality of A (and sometimes B as well); but in imagery the relation is explicit; in symbolism, implicit. Imagery says, "My love's like a red red rose" or "My love is a red red rose" or "How's my little red red rose this morning?" Symbolism describes a man in a garden trying to pluck a rosebud. Thus while B, the "vehicle," in imagery is relatively fugitive and ornamental, a symbolic B is substantial and integral. It exists in the poem apart from any comparisons it may be involved in: it may be a large and continuous element such as a setting or a character or a plot. Studies of the symbolism of Samson Agonistes have so far been confined chiefly to those that treat the poem typologically or as an allegory of Milton's life and times.

Milton on the Position of Woman

IMPORTANT as are Milton's prose works in representing to us his opinions, they must yield in interest to his poetry. One of the functions of his prose is to assist in the interpretation of his poetry, for Milton's life and thought were so unified that the real man is to be found in any of his utterances, and a passage from one work can often be used to clarify another in a different context. It is especially fortunate that we have prose works plainly giving his opinions, for much of his poetry is of a dramatic nature, and the dramatic portions cannot be assumed to give his beliefs except as they agree with passages in his prose. While in his poetry Milton does not speak directly on divorce, both in his own person and through the months of his characters he does give much on the subject of the relations of man and wife, which, of necessity, he dealt with in his writings on divorce. Above all, he shows by example how men and women actually conduct themselves to each other.

Milton's life and reign of King Charls

Milton's life and reign of King Charls