The Poetry of John Milton

by Gordon Teskey

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 .

Genres: Poetry, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

640 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2015

About the author

Gordon 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.

Reviews

[Random Anonymous Pseudonym* · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.