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 Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold.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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... once wrote of Giotto, “is his choice of moments.” Faced with the task of illustrating the life of any Christian figure, the painter always singled out the “decisive instant” in the story, the turning point of the entire narrative. In ...
... once did sing, That he our deadly forfeit should release, And with his Father work us a perpetual peace. [1-7] No sooner does the poet begin to celebrate the coming of the Messiah than he reminds us of the Old Testament prophets who had ...
... once more, 0 ye laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never sere, / I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude” (1-3). The elegy is simply the most recent in a chain of repeated exercises in premature poetic utterance by ...
... once removed, there shall come ... a most delightfull spectacle of perpetuall peace, joined with abundance of all good thinges.”11 So when Milton declared in 1641 that “thy Kingdome is now at hand, and thou standing at the dore,” he was ...
... once again, of course, the much debated issue of Milton's political stance in the years preceding the Puritan revolution. David Norbrook believes that “Milton's early poetry is radical not only in its explicit political comments but in ...