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 Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold.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. |
Részletek a könyvből
1 - 5 találat összesen 41 találatból.
... Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough reads like a prologue to the Nativity Ode; in the opening stanza of the The Passion, Milton begins by remembering his celebration of the “joyous news of heav'nly Infant's birth” (3) in the Ode ...
... death. Yet different as they are both generically and thematically, all three poems exemplify the characteristic mode of apprehending and representing human experience that I call “the Miltonic moment.” THIS BOOK IS THE PRODUCT of ...
... Death of a Fair Infant, in L'Allegro, in II Penseroso, and in Lycidas, to name only the most obvious instances. But even when Milton adopts a narratorial stance, as he does in the opening stanza of the Nativity Ode, he structures the ...
... death.6 The “betweenness” I shall be attempting to define resides in a temporal interstice between two events, or two sequences of events, on a chronological continuum. This recurrent sense of intermediacy in Milton's early works ...
... death of the old man; then and only then could the birth of the new man take place. The obvious problem with this description has to do with the relationship between the two men. To put it as simply as possible, in what sense, if any ...