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 Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold.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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... instance, Giotto focused on the moment at which the Sultan is actually in the process of abandoning paganism for Christianity. The saint stands on the very brink of the flames, but he has not yet entered them. Sensing their impending ...
... instances. But even when Milton adopts a narratorial stance, as he does in the opening stanza of the Nativity Ode, he structures the poem in such a way that by the time we come to the end of it the voice (or, as I shall argue later, the ...
... instance, history is temporarily suspended as the poem begins; the sun literally stands still, and the poem unfolds in a kind of extratemporal interim until, at the end of the final stanza, the frozen tableau at the manger is about to ...
... instance, the Nativity Ode “is structured so that the meditator himself experiences a conversion from pagan illusion to the new Christian truth of the babe in the manger.”4 In much the same vein, I.S. MacLaren argues that the poem ...
... instance, remarks that, in order “to match the Pagan's Messianic prophecy, [Milton] has written a pastoral Birth Song for the real Messiah, in which Christian purity and truth dispense with the gaudy trim of Pagan imagery.”18 And the ...