John Milton Is Turning 400 Years Old

Many venues in New York (and, I assume, elsewhere) are getting ready to celebrate and pay tribute. I will definitely need to check out the exhibit at the Morgan Library (opening in October) – and I just love this entire article about the extravaganza being planned at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center. First of all, it’s launching with a costume ball this Saturday. But the center has put together a multi-floored exhibit – of paintings and sculpture – honoring Milton, inspired by Milton – some connections more vague than others – the article states (and this made me laugh):

With the exception of some lovely abstractions by Ms. Nii, who was an acclaimed painter before she bought the bank building and became a full-time arts administrator, most of the paintings are at the visionary/fantastical end of the spectrum. To judge from them alone, you might guess that “Paradise Lost” was a poem that involved the ingestion of psychedelic substances and that made particular mention of giant eyeballs and naked female breasts.

The beautiful thing about all of this, though, is that interpretation is still alive and well … which speaks volumes for the original Paradise Lost. When you no longer feel that it is your right to “interpret” – then a work can be considered dead. Fine, have it be a museum piece, under glass … and let its relevance fade. I am really looking forward to seeing the art – and while I am sure some of it will annoy me (I’m not really into modern art) – I am looking forward to experiencing Paradise Lost through multiple eyes (or should I say multiple “giant eyeballs”). The thought of that really excites me.

I am a Milton fan – and his “sonnet to his blindness” is, along with Auden’s “The More Loving One” – my favorite poem of all time. I don’t just love the writing. I feel altered when I read it. Sometimes I stay away from it – because I just can’t deal with the implications of it – what it seems to demand, and ask, and tell … it’s like looking directly at the sun.

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bar his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

Jesus Mary and Joseph, Milton, are you trying to kill me??

Not to mention the fact that the man was completely blind when he wrote Paradise Lost. He DICTATED the thing to his daughter. Goosebumps.

Here’s a wonderful article about Milton in The New Yorker.

I am really looking forward to the exhibition in Williamsburg. I kinda want to show up there on Saturday night and watch the people arrive, all in costume. Should be pretty fantastical!!

Some quotes about Milton below:

“Milton, with the possible exception of Spenser, is the first eccentric English poet, the first to make a myth out of his personal experience, and to invent a language of his own remote from the spoken word.” — W.H. Auden

Milton, even Milton, rankt with living men!
Over the highest Alps of mind he marches,
And far below him spring the baseless arches
Of Iris, colouring dimly lake and fen.
— Walter Savage Landor

“His harmonicall and ingeniose Soul did lodge in a beautifull and well-proportioned body. He was a spare man … He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire – he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ’s College. Ovall face. His eie a darke gray.” — John Aubrey

“Yet for two and a half centuries – even for a ‘speaker’ like Wordsworth – Milton’s virtue was this language, which engaged and developed subjects difficult to combine, moral verities and the created world. The language of speech is not the only, or first, language of poetry. To criticize work in terms strictly irrelevant to it is of little value: a critical act of “brute assertive will”, or a prejudice so ingrained as to be indistinguishable, for uncritical readers, from truth itself. With the decline of literacy, Milton, like Spenser, becomes a more difficult mountain to scale, more remote from the ‘common reader’. Yet Chaucer and Shakespeare, the only poets in the tradition who are Milton’s superiors, both grow and recede in the same way and are not dismissed. They seem more accessible. In the end Leavis’s hostility, like Empson’s and Richards’s in other areas, is to the Christian content of the poems, and in Milton it is obtrusive and central. We read Herbert’s and Donne’s divine poems even if we are unbelievers: there is their doubt to engage, and the framed drama of specific situations. But Milton will not allow disbelief to go unchallenged: his structures and narratives are not rooted in individual faith but in universal belief. The question of revealed truth raises its head as in no other poet in the language.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancieng English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself lay.
— Wordsworth

“In Milton the world of Spenser was reconfigured and almost unrecognisable … What had been reasonable and courteous, a belief in the fact that men of culture and intellect will be able to engage in rational discussion and agree to disagree, had been displaced by faction and sometimes violent intolerance. The moderate had stood down and the fanatic had taken his place, in the pulpit, in Parliament, and on the very peaks of Parnassus.” — TS Eliot

“I take it to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, to leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.” — John Milton

“I have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about with me, in order to study the sentiments – the dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid, unyielding independence, the desperate daring, the noble defiance of hardship, in that great personage, SATAN.” — Robert Burns

“He was much more admired abrode than at home.” — John Aubrey

“My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception than arises from the contemplation of this greatest man in his latter days: poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted: ‘Darkness before and danger’s voice behind,’ in an age in which he was as little understood by the party for whom, as by that against whom, he had contended, and among men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or, if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless
… argue not
Against Heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer’d
Right onward.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“True musical delight consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another.” — John Milton

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for…that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.” — John Miltom