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 Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold.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. |
Im Buch
Ergebnisse 1-5 von 56
... Poetic Birth: Milton's Poems of 1645 (1991) most subsequent analyses of these texts have treated them separately in individual articles or monographs. By doing so, they may have unintentionally distracted us from what I believe to be ...
J. Martin Evans. conventional boundaries that separate one poetic text from another. For example, with its modified ... poet, perhaps, Milton's early poetry is all of a piece. To treat any single component of it in isolation is to run ...
... poetic output, and not least of the three poems with which I shall be principally concerned in this study. All three ... poet begin to celebrate the coming of the Messiah than he reminds us of the Old Testament prophets who had foretold ...
... poetic utterance by John Milton. As we begin to read it, we are being asked to remember everything that the poet has written so far. And just as they begin by looking back, so Milton's poems usually end by looking forward. Indeed ...
... poet's favorite mode of address, the dramatic monologue, which he uses in the Carmina Elegiaca, in On the Death of a Fair Infant, in L'Allegro, in II Penseroso, and in Lycidas, to name only the most obvious instances. But even when ...