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The Poetry of John Milton
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 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 the intense intellectual debate Paradise Regained, and the tragedy Samson Agonistes .
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 the intense intellectual debate Paradise Regained, and the tragedy Samson Agonistes .
640 pages, Hardcover
First published June 15, 2015
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About the author
Gordon Teskey
13 books3 followersGordon Teskey is Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Delirious Milton: The Poet in the Modern World and Allegory and Violence, and co-editor of Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 28, 2024
This book speaks to you of Milton as a poet. And boy O boy, does it not do so brilliantly?
Milton’s poetic career, like his own life, can well be divided into three distinct periods.
In the first period we find him as a ‘postponed Elizabethan’, gleaning the stray ears of corn after the flourishing harvest of Elizabethan poetry was over.
He is now young, triumphant and anticipative – he is cultivating the art of poetry in the quiet seclusion of Horton.
In L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso we find him echoing the joyful notes of Elizabethan England.
But the sublimit of the Nativity Ode, the moral grandeur of Comus, the fervent and articulate denunciation of the episcopal system in Lycidas, prove beyond doubt that a new tone has already made its way into English poetry.
The resourceful genius of the Elizabethan has made room for the religious fervour of the Puritans. However, Milton was not destined to live long in this happy Arcadia.
A storm was already brewing up in the atmosphere and soon burst out in great fury. The great constitutional struggle upset his plan and he plunged headlong into the momentous affairs of the time.
The hotness of divergence and the din of pamphleteering made him forget the great mission of his life, and his poetic talent suffered a long and deplorable eclipse.
The few sonnets that he wrote during this period shine like brilliant rockets amidst the long and monotonous darkness of his vituperative pamphlets. They are the trumpets through which he blew “soul animating strains’.
Milton’s sonnets open a new and inspiring chapter in the history of sonnet-writing. They are not conventional sonnets of the Elizabethan pattern as vehicles of studied amorous sentiments.
Milton was not the man:
“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade
Or with the tangles of Naera’s hair.”
Each of his sonnets is worth its weight in gold. They sometimes have the force and fire of a volcanic eruption, occasionally melt with affectionate pathos, on occasion glow with concentrated patriotism, and every so often overpower us with an awful spirit of audacity and self-sacrifice.
They constitute a noble autobiography of the poet. After the Restoration, the third and the greatest period of his poetic life begins.
The storm has passed. It has ruthlessly blown down the dream-dome of his Puritan Commonwealth. His countrymen have accommodated themselves to the spirit of the time and have returned to monarchy and episcopacy.
The blind poet with a hundred scars of battle all over his body and mind now took up his pen with renewed vigour. He emerged from the deep quicksand of politics and pamphleteering not only with no loss of strength, but wiser, steadier, more pious and powerful.
The author of the Horton poems could never be the author of Paradise Lost.
As the Israelites had to pass through long and terrible sufferings in desert and wilderness in order to purify their hearts and to cast behind them the tradition of Egyptian slavery, before God allowed them to enter the Promised Land, so Milton had to pass through a severe discipline.
He had to forget the lenient, idealistic disposition of the Horton poems before he could successfully write such a militant and sublime epic as the Paradise Lost. It is the ode of consummate scholarship.
A sublime thing in literature can scarcely be conceived….
In grandeur of conception and execution, majesty of diction and magnificence of music, it is incomparable in English poetry.
The unembellished straightforwardness and unembellished sumptuousness of Paradise Regained have a special charm and appeal of their own. Last of all comes Samson Agonistes, the swan song of Milton.
The blind, old, disappointed and solitary idealist, “fallen on evil days and evil tongues”, ridiculed by the Philistines of the court of the profligate King Charles II and amidst the wrecks of his youthful dreams, Milton could hardly have found a better and fitter subject for the farewell song of his life.
It is the noblest, the truest and the most pathetic of the autobiographical poems in the English language.
Therefore, we find that his poetry is his life-blood, and to know Milton’s poetry is to know Milton himself. We note below some of the most prominent characteristics of his poetry.
And that is what this Milton guy was. And he was much much more.
Read this book. It will offer new perceptions to the man who you thought you knew so well!!
Milton’s poetic career, like his own life, can well be divided into three distinct periods.
In the first period we find him as a ‘postponed Elizabethan’, gleaning the stray ears of corn after the flourishing harvest of Elizabethan poetry was over.
He is now young, triumphant and anticipative – he is cultivating the art of poetry in the quiet seclusion of Horton.
In L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso we find him echoing the joyful notes of Elizabethan England.
But the sublimit of the Nativity Ode, the moral grandeur of Comus, the fervent and articulate denunciation of the episcopal system in Lycidas, prove beyond doubt that a new tone has already made its way into English poetry.
The resourceful genius of the Elizabethan has made room for the religious fervour of the Puritans. However, Milton was not destined to live long in this happy Arcadia.
A storm was already brewing up in the atmosphere and soon burst out in great fury. The great constitutional struggle upset his plan and he plunged headlong into the momentous affairs of the time.
The hotness of divergence and the din of pamphleteering made him forget the great mission of his life, and his poetic talent suffered a long and deplorable eclipse.
The few sonnets that he wrote during this period shine like brilliant rockets amidst the long and monotonous darkness of his vituperative pamphlets. They are the trumpets through which he blew “soul animating strains’.
Milton’s sonnets open a new and inspiring chapter in the history of sonnet-writing. They are not conventional sonnets of the Elizabethan pattern as vehicles of studied amorous sentiments.
Milton was not the man:
“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade
Or with the tangles of Naera’s hair.”
Each of his sonnets is worth its weight in gold. They sometimes have the force and fire of a volcanic eruption, occasionally melt with affectionate pathos, on occasion glow with concentrated patriotism, and every so often overpower us with an awful spirit of audacity and self-sacrifice.
They constitute a noble autobiography of the poet. After the Restoration, the third and the greatest period of his poetic life begins.
The storm has passed. It has ruthlessly blown down the dream-dome of his Puritan Commonwealth. His countrymen have accommodated themselves to the spirit of the time and have returned to monarchy and episcopacy.
The blind poet with a hundred scars of battle all over his body and mind now took up his pen with renewed vigour. He emerged from the deep quicksand of politics and pamphleteering not only with no loss of strength, but wiser, steadier, more pious and powerful.
The author of the Horton poems could never be the author of Paradise Lost.
As the Israelites had to pass through long and terrible sufferings in desert and wilderness in order to purify their hearts and to cast behind them the tradition of Egyptian slavery, before God allowed them to enter the Promised Land, so Milton had to pass through a severe discipline.
He had to forget the lenient, idealistic disposition of the Horton poems before he could successfully write such a militant and sublime epic as the Paradise Lost. It is the ode of consummate scholarship.
A sublime thing in literature can scarcely be conceived….
In grandeur of conception and execution, majesty of diction and magnificence of music, it is incomparable in English poetry.
The unembellished straightforwardness and unembellished sumptuousness of Paradise Regained have a special charm and appeal of their own. Last of all comes Samson Agonistes, the swan song of Milton.
The blind, old, disappointed and solitary idealist, “fallen on evil days and evil tongues”, ridiculed by the Philistines of the court of the profligate King Charles II and amidst the wrecks of his youthful dreams, Milton could hardly have found a better and fitter subject for the farewell song of his life.
It is the noblest, the truest and the most pathetic of the autobiographical poems in the English language.
Therefore, we find that his poetry is his life-blood, and to know Milton’s poetry is to know Milton himself. We note below some of the most prominent characteristics of his poetry.
And that is what this Milton guy was. And he was much much more.
Read this book. It will offer new perceptions to the man who you thought you knew so well!!
May 6, 2022
Interesting, eminently readable, and delightfully written, Gordon Teskey's "The Poetry of John Milton" is an extensive and well-informed survey of Milton's creativity. This book is, as Teskey puts it, "about being a poet" insofar as it follows Milton's trajectory in roughly chronological order and gradually introduces the reader to Milton's world and his poetic growth. In this regard, this book would certainly be a nice complement of other more biographical studies such as, for example, Gordon Campbell's excellent "John Milton: Life, Work and Thought". Reading it feels like listening to a lecture by Teskey!
Having said that, the book is very long indeed. "The Poetry of John Milton" is not as theoretically and conceptually ambitious as Teskey's great "Delirious Milton". Its discussion of Milton and the Romantics (interesting as it is) does not add a lot to scholarly debates on the topic and does not really relate clearly to the overarching themes of the book as a whole. But, on the whole, I would recommend this enthusiastic, insightful and accessible book to anyone interested in Milton and, more specifically, to students trying to understand Milton's fascinating albeit challenging poetic style.
Having said that, the book is very long indeed. "The Poetry of John Milton" is not as theoretically and conceptually ambitious as Teskey's great "Delirious Milton". Its discussion of Milton and the Romantics (interesting as it is) does not add a lot to scholarly debates on the topic and does not really relate clearly to the overarching themes of the book as a whole. But, on the whole, I would recommend this enthusiastic, insightful and accessible book to anyone interested in Milton and, more specifically, to students trying to understand Milton's fascinating albeit challenging poetic style.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews