The Miltonic MomentUniversity Press of Kentucky, 2021. dec. 14. - 176 oldal 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 Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold.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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... argue later, the voices) singing the hymn seems to be physically present at the manger in Bethlehem: “But see, the Virgin blest / Hath laid her Babe to rest. / Time is our tedious song should here have ending” (237-39). The narrative ...
... argue that the Nativity Ode is nothing less than a prolonged meditation on the physical, moral, spiritual, and literary consequences of the Christian experience of regeneration. In chapter 2 I investigate the parallel transition in ...
... argues that the poem enacts “the process by which the narrator gradually perceives the significance of both God's offer of grace through the Son and man's responsibility for response entailed in that offer.”5 And Georgia Christopher ...
... argue, the Nativity Ode is the most rigorously depersonalized of all Milton's nondramatic works. It is a poem that faces not inward but outward, a poem that casts the reader rather than the poet in the role of the convert. To begin with ...
... argues that, by “putting off epic expansiveness to dwell in the 'humble ode,'” Milton enacts a kenosis or “emptying out” analogous to “Christ's decision to forego heaven and lie 'meanly wrapt in the rude manger'.”13 My point is that ...