John Milton Sources for your Essay

John Milton Poetry


This paper will explore the notion of how Milton struggled with feelings of worthiness and justification and how he reconciled these feelings through his faith. According to Abrahms, Milton's blindness represents a "severe test" which proves to be a challenge difficult to accept at times (Abrahms 1443)

John Milton Poetry


" As it did in Puritans minds, the parable of the talents loomed large in Milton's mind as well. (Abrahms 1443) and critics have been in complete agreement that 'one talent' represents Milton's literary endowment" (Bloom 48)

John Milton Poetry


Because Milton understands his talent to be his gift of writing, he feels as though his service to God is now diminished as a result of being blind. (Nubla) In the fourth line of the poem, this sentiment is evident as Milton refers to his one talent as "useless

John Milton Poetry


However difficult the blindness proved to be at times and however his faith might have wavered, Milton was still able to write, which, according to the poem, was Milton's single talent. Lionel Trilling observed that even though Milton's blindness presented an understandable challenge, his greatest works were "performed under discountenance, and in blindness" (Trilling 121)

William Black and John Milton


The admiration for Milton, critics argue, comes from the way the Romantic poets read his work. "Shakespeare and Spenser seemed kinder forebears; Milton was difficult, demanding, and troubling, so that those poets -- and critics after them -- seemed to relate to Milton within the ethos of Paradise Lost: war, rebellion, duty, obedience" (Alexander 3)

William Black and John Milton


However, in Milton's version of the story, Satan is already cognizant of Adam. It is not his rise that the reader witnesses but rather the elevation of Christ (Anderson 13)

William Black and John Milton


The Bishop published a document entitled A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libel, wherein Milton was called all manner of insults and accused of every form of blasphemy. Bishop Hall called upon all Christian men to "stone [Milton] to death, lest they should smart from his impunity" (Griswold 2)

William Black and John Milton


Rather he opposed organized religion and the exclusionary nature of certain practices. He supposedly bragged that he had only been to church three times in his life: his baptism, his marriage, and eventually he would attend his funeral service (Harris 1)

William Black and John Milton


It is interesting that John Milton would undertake a potentially heretical view of religion in his later years when his initial ambition was to study for the church. This changed however when he discovered that "tyranny had invaded the Church" (Parry)

Milton\'s Sonnets John Milton\'s Sonnets:


They argue that the neo-Christians are wrong on both counts; that Milton continually questioned Christian doctrine and here they praise Empson, including its theological paradigms of male and female. They argue that on the one hand he endorsed 'a revolutionary political and religious life which is also sexually radical' but that 'nor should we ignore Milton's inevitable complicity with orthodox sexist ideology… there are limits to how far even a heroic individual can transcend his background and education, in thought and practice' (Aers and Hodge 1981:84)

Milton\'s Sonnets John Milton\'s Sonnets:


Gilbert argues that the poem remained largely unchallenged in its literary presentation of the archetypes of male and female characteristics up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century's (Gilbert emphasizes the work of the Brontes and Virginia Woolf), found themselves dealing not only with non-literary social codes of gender stereotyping but also with a literary text which claims to describe, indeed verify, the origins of these socio-cultural abstracts

Milton\'s Sonnets John Milton\'s Sonnets:


Christ is the decent, conventional sibling while Satan is the deviant 'son of God' who enters a pseudo-social relationship with Eve (he is in a general sense her 'seducer' in Book IX), which in turn results in the perpetration of Satanesque deviance in Eve's seduction of Adam and the creation of humanity (Newlyn, 1993). The fact that the voice of male authority is unattended by a physical presence, and is by implication timeless and transcendent, while her own self-image is that of an attractive, silent object prefigures, so Froula argues, an entire tradition involving the patriarchal governance of language, with the female as the silent subject (Le Comte, 1978)

Milton\'s Sonnets John Milton\'s Sonnets:


In his representation of Eve he dramatizes and reinforces the ingrained perception of woman as, in various ways, allied to the more dangerous and degenerate human tendencies. Consequently Paradise Lost has functioned for women readers and, significantly, for women writers as a dominant, even threatening, cultural monolith (Nyquist, 1999)

Milton\'s Sonnets John Milton\'s Sonnets:


Gilbert's essay extends the structuralist-sociological model of Landy (1972) who looks at the characters of Paradise Lost in terms of the traditional, Western, family. Christ is the decent, conventional sibling while Satan is the deviant 'son of God' who enters a pseudo-social relationship with Eve (he is in a general sense her 'seducer' in Book IX), which in turn results in the perpetration of Satanesque deviance in Eve's seduction of Adam and the creation of humanity (Newlyn, 1993)

Meeting of Opposites John Milton\'s


I have always felt that Eve was the heroine of the story of Genesis rather than its villain, for (as noted above) she provides the mechanism through which we become fully human. Looked at from a viewpoint that Milton would no doubt find heretical, I would argue that if we consider humanity as we are when God is finished with us (in the story of Genesis), then we are still half-made, an incomplete and hardly satisfactory product (Dobranski and Rumrich 49)

Meeting of Opposites John Milton\'s


As we read through the first four books, as we read of Satan's stratagems and, we are made viscerally aware of the ways in which Eve and Adam will be dragged across the line into the world of darkness with Lucifer, of how they have been transformed. And of how much energy the original humans will need to turn themselves back to the life (Fish 71)

Meeting of Opposites John Milton\'s


And even although we know this story, even though we know who is good and who is evil and where this is all heading, as we hear Milton's description of Lucifer's strength and even his magnificence (for he is wondrous, if dark) we find ourselves sympathizing with Lucifer. The story for the first several books is Lucifer's story, or it seems as if it might be (Forsyth 16)

Meeting of Opposites John Milton\'s


Milton seems to reject entirely this more beneficent version of the serpent, and it seems likely that his readers would have done so as well, given the orthodoxy of the time. But for us, as postmodern readers from the twenty-first century, we can perhaps better appreciate the complexity of the symbol of the snake (Herman 181)

Meeting of Opposites John Milton\'s


In his world, things are either one thing or another and cormorants are neither fish nor fowl (nor good red herring, to complete the trope). Anything that contains both sides of a dualistic equation in such a perfect balance must be fundamentally untrustworthy (Kelly 135)

Meeting of Opposites John Milton\'s


His description of the diminishing of once-great and powerful (and beneficent) gods and their transmutation into their own opposites provides us with an epistemological microcosm of Milton's world. (Milton would no doubt argue that this is also a microcosm of God's world