The Miltonic MomentUniversity Press of Kentucky, 14.12.2021 - 176 Seiten Milton's poems invariably depict the decisive instant in a story, a moment of crisis that takes place just before the action undergoes a dramatic change of course. Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold. Martin Evans identifies this moment of transition as "the Miltonic Moment." This provocative new study focuses primarily on three of Milton's best known early poems: "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," "A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus)," and "Lycidas." These texts share a distinctive perceptual and cognitive structure, which Evans defines as characteristically Miltonic, embracing a single moment that is both ending and beginning. The poems communicate a profound sense of intermediacy because they seem to take place between the boundaries that separate events. The works illuniated here, which also include Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, are all about transition from one form to another: from paganism to Christianity, from youthful inexperience to moral maturity, and from pastoral retirement to heroic engagement. This transformation is often ideological as well as historical or biographical. Evans shows that the moment of transition is characteristic of all Milton's poetry, and he proposes a new way of reading one of the seminal writers of the seventeenth century. Evans concludes that the narrative reversals in Milton's poetry suggest his constant attempts to bring about an intellectual revolution that, at a time of religious and political change in England, would transform an age. |
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... Lycidas. 4. Milton, John, 1608-1674. Comus. 5. Renaissance—England. I. Title. II. Series. PR3588.E9 1998 821'.4—dc21 97-53104 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard ...
... Lycidas invites us to remember every poem Milton had ever written before 1637. To a greater degree than that of any other English poet, perhaps, Milton's early poetry is all of a piece. To treat any single component of it in isolation ...
... Lycidas, on the other hand, link the forthcoming lament not to any earlier incidents in the history of Cambridge University or the life of Edward King but rather to the literary biography of the poem's author: “Yet once more, 0 ye ...
... Lycidas, to name only the most obvious instances. But even when Milton adopts a narratorial stance, as he does in the opening stanza of the Nativity Ode, he structures the poem in such a way that by the time we come to the end of it the ...
... Lycidas both temporal and narrative continuities are interrupted, as the elegy insists on its own status as a mere interval by beginning in the dramatic present and then, in the final lines, projecting both the singer and his song ...