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 Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold.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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... violated the traditional division between octave and sestet in the sonnet on his blindness, so Milton seems to have been consciously challenging the conventional boundaries that separate one poetic text from another. For PREFACE.
... choice of moments is equally significant, and for many of the same reasons. Like Giotto, Milton always seems to concentrate on the “decisive instant,” the narrative juncture at which INTRODUCTION: THE MILTONIC MOMENT.
... seems to me to be paradigmatic of Milton's entire poetic output, and not least of the three poems with which I shall be principally concerned in this study. All three, we may begin by noting, commence with an act of recollection. The ...
... seems to conclude at nightfall, in reality a new dawn is about to break; the Christ child is about to embark on his redemptive mission. Like the sleeper in the Carmina Elegiaca, the world is about to begin a new day. In Comus, too, the ...
... seems to be physically present at the manger in Bethlehem: “But see, the Virgin blest / Hath laid her Babe to rest ... seem to take place between the boundaries that separate one event, or one series of events, from another; they.