Milton's 400th Anniversary

[poliphilo]

John Milton's 400th birtday is passing off without fireworks or dancing in the streets. They haven't even given him a postage stamp. Newspaper columnists are skirting round the poetry to celebrate his defence of freedom of the press in the Areopagitica. One of these celebrants is Andreas Whittam Smith, the former film censor.

How can you believe in freedom of the press and be any kind of censor?

I haven't read the Areopagitica. I haven't read any of Milton's prose. I haven't ever read more than a couple of books of Paradise Lost. I studied Comus for "A" level and- after initial repugnance- fell in love with it.  I like the sonnet "On His Blindness". When I feel like the world is passing me by I mutter to myself, "They also serve who only stand and wait". It's one of my favourite tags.

A patchy record. I'm not proud of it.

It's obvious why Milton is a neglected classic- he's too heavy and humorless, his theology is moribund,  we don't like- in fact we detest- the god whose ways he set out to justify.  I'd like to say his current eclipse is some sort of passing fashion, but I don't think it is. We read him- if we do- for the gorgeousness of his language- not for anything he has to say about the human condition. He was a man of ideas- many of them bad or half-baked- who subordinated his wonderful imagination to apologetics.

Comments

[wolfshift.livejournal.com]

Sometimes the "great" poets are pretty awful. There are many literary classics that are only classics because we're told they're classics. I think it's good that the work of people like Milton is being more and more ignored.

There's no point celebrating a poet if nobody finds his work worth reading.

Now if only Tennyson would go out of fashion...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You don't like Tennyson?

Idylls of the King is pretty dreadful (I have actually read it all the way through) but he wrote some killer lyrics.

[wolfshift.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can't stand Tennyson. I had to read Idylls of the King (parts of it), In Memoriam, and at least one other major poem of his whose title I can't now remember. His ideas are interesting, but I just find his verse unbearably tedious.

Not that I'm fond of anybody's verse in that period. To my ears and mind, poetry doesn't get interesting until the 20th century, with an exception for Blake.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I admire In Memoriam. Maybe it goes on a bit.

Victorian poets didn't see brevity as a virtue. They had an audience prepared to spend hours over novel-length poems. Then along came T.V.

I love Browning. He's got a modern sensibility. He's just about the first English poet since Shakespeare to use the whole of the language- to write serious (as opposed to comic) poems about "unpoetic" subjects.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I miss epic poetry. *sigh*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Maybe its time will come again.