Discuss
John Milton as a Poet.
John
Milton is regarded as the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. Yet for
sublimity and philosophical grandeur, Milton stands almost alone in world
literature. His peers are Homer, Virgil, Dante, Wordsworth, and Goethe: poets
who achieve a total ethical and spiritual vision of the world. In this
panoramic interpretation, the distinguished Milton scholar Gordon Teskey shows
how the poet’s changing commitments are subordinated to an aesthetic that joins
beauty to truth and value to ethics. The art of poetry is rediscovered by
Milton as a way of thinking in the world as it is, and for the world as it can
be.
Milton’s
early poems include the heroic Nativity Ode; the seductive paired poems
“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”; the mythological pageant Comus, with its comically
diabolical enchanter and its serious debate on the human use of nature; and
“Lycidas,” perhaps the greatest short poem in English and a prophecy of vast
human displacements in the modern world. Teskey follows Milton’s creative
development in three phases, from the idealistic transcendence of the poems
written in his twenties to the political engagement of the gritty, hard-hitting
poems of his middle years. The third phase is that of “transcendental engagement,”
in the heaven-storming epic Paradise
Lost, and the great works that followed it: the intense intellectual debate Paradise Regained, and the
tragedy Samson Agonistes.
