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 Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold.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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... senses gradually come back to life, beginning with the sense of hearing: “Now crows the sentinel bird, the cock, herald of the sun, and wakeful calls each man to his business” (3-4). Then the sense of sight becomes aware of the rising ...
... sense of immediacy. They typically take place not then and there but here and now, before our very eyes. More often than not, this intense presentness is created by the poet's favorite mode of address, the dramatic monologue, which he ...
... sense of intermediacy is primarily narrative; the Lady's adventures are an interruption in her journey to Ludlow Castle, an unwelcome hiatus in a progressive movement toward celebration and reunion. And in Lycidas both temporal and ...
... sense, “vacation exercises,” written in the intervals separating different phases of their author's life. To a greater or lesser extent, they are themselves pivotal events in Milton's biography. No less significantly, perhaps, all three ...
... sense of imminent cosmic renovation gripped many Englishmen during the period in which Milton was composing the Nativity Ode, Comus, and Lycidas. A characteristic passage from Brightman's treatise may suggest something of the prevailing ...