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 Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold.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.
... tradition. If we compare the Nativity Ode with almost any other celebration of Christ's birth written in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, what strikes us immediately is the absence of any reference in Milton's poem to the effect ...
... traditional positions. The former eventually makes a brief appearance in the final stanza; the latter never appears at all. As Blake failed to notice when he illustrated the poem, the only figures we encounter in the early stanzas are ...
... tradition asserted that the birth of Christ had been prophesied not only by the prophets of the Old Testament but also by such Roman seers as the Sibyl at Cumae.20 In Augustine's words, “There were also prophets not of God himself, and ...
... what for a long time was the church's principal strategy for converting not only the literature but the entire cultural tradition of the ancient world, the strategy of inclusion, as I shall call it. Over and over again, the various.