## Metadata - Author: [[Gordon Teskey]] - Full Title: The Poetry of John Milton - Category: #books ## Highlights - Milton learned from the Greek tragedians, especially from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, and more especially from the character of Clytemnestra—a woman, no less, and a queen—that there is much to be gained from an aesthetic point of view by making evil characters complex, glamorous, and persuasive, and to do so without changing what they are. ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=130)) - As for God, Milton learned from Homer, as he did even better from Virgil, that little is lost by making the king of the gods legalistic, dull, and sententious, as people in charge generally are—and perhaps are required to be. ([Location 135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=135)) - It seems to me no great poem can yield entirely to philological explication without interference, ambiguity, and, to use the language of information theory, noise introduced from the process of making, the underlying hum of production. The deep mystery of a poem, the sense, however illusory, of almost infinite meaning, is generated by this continual tension between philology and poetics. The dissonance, if sufficiently rich and suggestive, is passed on to the third phase, aesthetics, where it becomes resonance. So the poem endures, and is judged to be good, because of its profundity. Noise is recycled as meaning. ([Location 153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=153)) - The problem of history for Milton, to put it simply at the outset, is how to win liberty and keep it. ([Location 220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=220)) - To be truly free, you should be capable of freeing yourself. But how can you do so if you are not free within yourself, if your appetites and passions tyrannize over you? From a Christian point of view, which accepts the conviction of sin, to free oneself one would have to be already what one is striving to become. That is a predicament requiring aid from outside the system, aid known as grace. But this aid, once it arrives, as the incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ, must itself become a part of the system, thus inaugurating an economy of sacrifice: Christ must become a human being and be put to the test. ([Location 232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=232)) - a Christian must in some way (whether as a victory over sin, as a penal substitution for sin, or as an example of self-sacrifice for others) believe Jesus died for the sins of humanity.6 But Milton believed Jesus showed humanity how to win liberty and keep it. ([Location 250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=250)) - Milton has an idea of historical time as a series of moments of opportunity, of kairos (the instant in battle when there is an opening in the ranks of the enemy, allowing the archer to send the arrow at a prime target) in which the possibility of radical freedom can be seized. ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=255)) - The status of the Bible for Milton is perhaps easy to misunderstand, at the outset of the twenty-first century. For him, it was a revolutionary, not a conservative, book. The Bible was the one text that held absolute authority as political truth and could therefore be used to overturn the lies on which corruption and tyranny are based. Like his follower, William Blake, Milton seized on the Bible as an instrument for chastising the arrogance of power and exposing the weakness of its servants. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=277)) - We are all of us helpless at least twice in our lives: when we are born and when we are dying. Christianity exposes this condition by means of two images: the infant in its mother’s arms and the naked man hanging on the cross. Such images were not particularly stimulating to Milton, who came to Christianity and the Bible like a commander and a conqueror, not like a servant, still less a suffering servant. He took hold of the system of biblical Christianity and bent it to his will. ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=364)) - Matthew Arnold approaches the heart of the matter when he says Milton is always “a great artist in the great style” and that reading him is the closest you can come in English to the experience of reading poetry in Greek, that is, to reading Homer, Pindar, and Sophocles. ([Location 440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=440)) - I can give no better or shorter description of these two sides to Milton’s verse, the head and the heart, than by quoting what H. D. F. Kitto says of Greek art: “The greatness of Greek art—and let us use the word in its most inclusive sense—lies in this, that it completely reconciles two principles which are often opposed: on the one hand control and clarity and fundamental seriousness; on the other, brilliance, imagination and passion. ([Location 463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=463)) - The acoustic field is organized according to time, such that everything is temporally successive, each line, and each word, holding its position until supplanted by the next. As a blind man—one who had been severely addicted to print from a young age—Milton saw more clearly than ever what the sighted were blind to: the need to restore to the experience of poetry the quality of an event unfolding in time. ([Location 492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=492)) - As when one is in a broad river with islands, where topography can deceive, and where one must discern from subtle indications in the water the direction in which the main channel flows, so in Milton’s verse we watch for these subtle but absorbing indications. We become accustomed to unpredictable word order; we pay attention to vestigial inflexions (me and my); and we watch relative pronouns with especial care. Without such vigilance we may be forced to work back upstream and find another way down. But we are relentlessly pushed along all the same. ([Location 533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=533)) - In biblical terms, the condescension from the divine to the human is a covenant, an effort by God to establish a working relationship with humanity. The first covenant was the simple command not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. With the breaking of this covenant, however, human nature is so vitiated by sin, by the Fall, that future efforts to restore the relationship between the divine and the human are rendered ineffectual by the inability of humankind to keep its side of the covenant. Yet God is determined that his relationship shall be restored. History, biblical history, is the story of his efforts to do so. Up to the time of the Incarnation, God’s method of doing so is synecdochical: he lets one part of humankind stand for the whole, Noah and his family for the rest of humankind; Abraham and his descendants for the rest of humankind; Moses and the keepers of the Law, the Hebrews (later, the Jews), for the rest of humankind; David and his kingdom for the rest of humankind. ([Location 626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=626)) - But for Christians this promise is never fulfilled—or at least not in this way. The Incarnation of the Son of God in the person of Jesus Christ is therefore the next, and the most extreme, effort at making one part of humanity stand for the whole. Jesus stands for all. ([Location 637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=637)) - Milton rejoiced in the richness of classical myth and in the technical challenges of using it for his own rhetorical ends. A good example of his learning to do so, of his mastering what we might call mythopoeic supercondensation, is the workmanlike poem written on the death of the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, one John Gostlin, a medical doctor. This poem is not untypical of such performances, which were important to Milton’s later growth as a poet. If we put the bare statements of “In Obitum Procancellarii Medici” beside the number of allusions to classical myth by which each statement is supported, the skeletal structure of the elegy looks like this: Accept that you must die (four classical allusions). If strength could beat death (three classical allusions), If magic could beat death (three classical allusions), If medicine, the vice-chancellor’s specialty, could beat death (three classical allusions), You, vice-chancellor (three classical allusions), Would not have died (two classical allusions). But you did die (one classical allusion). May you rest peacefully (six classical allusions). The proportion of classical allusion to substance is by no means so consistently extreme as this in Paradise Lost, or even in “Lycidas.” But Milton practiced the art of mythopoeic supercondensation in the more than one thousand lines (1,078) of Latin verse he composed before the age of twenty-one. The experience gave him the technical foundation for the densely allusive but subtler productions of his maturity. ([Location 836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=836)) - The Greeks loved freedom—eleutheria—which was their greatest moral discovery, and Milton loved Psalm 114 because it illustrates what he most deeply believed: that what God wants for us all is our original but lost freedom.4 This teaching would be the central idea of Milton’s poetic maturity, in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. In the years during which he wrote polemical prose, the exodus from Egypt would be Milton’s symbol of the English Revolution. ([Location 969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=969)) - Paradise Lost was unfashionable in every respect: it didn’t rhyme; it didn’t address current events; it was biblical; it was classical; it was moral; it was densely allusive and astonishingly learned; it was hard to follow; its plot was complex; it was serious (its subject being the origin of history in original sin, the will of God for humanity, and the possibility of liberty for all mankind); and it was huge. ([Location 6369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0100PGT4A&location=6369))