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8 - John Milton

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2011

Claude Rawson
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

For a variety of reasons, Milton has acquired over the years a somewhat intimidating reputation as a poet. Thanks largely to his association with Puritanism, he is often thought to be a grim, humourless, unfeeling religious zealot, remote from the joys and sorrows of everyday human experience. In fact, although he could certainly sound as fierce and uncompromising as any hell-fire preacher, he could also be as sensuous as Keats, as passionate as Shakespeare, as rapturous as Gerard Manley Hopkins, and as playful as Donne. Of all our non-dramatic poets he is perhaps the most various, the most fully and richly human.

Yet beneath this bewildering variety of voices and moods there is one characteristic that seems to me to be quintessentially Miltonic: the poet’s contrariness. From the very beginning of his career, Milton evidently delighted in pitting one set of values or beliefs against another. An extraordinary number of his poems, that is to say, consist essentially of two antithetical movements based on diametrically opposed premises. In the opening stanzas of his first original English poem, ‘ On the Death of a Fair Infant’, for instance, the speaker assumes (a) that the child is dead, (b) that she was human, and (c) that her fate was caused by the descent of a pagan divinity:

O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted,

Soft silken primrose, fading timelessly,

Summer’s chief honour if thou hadst outlasted

Bleak Winter’s force that made thy blossom dry;

For he being amorous on that lovely dye,

That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss

But killed alas, and then bewailed his fatal bliss.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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  • John Milton
  • Claude Rawson, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to English Poets
  • Online publication: 28 May 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521874342.009
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  • John Milton
  • Claude Rawson, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to English Poets
  • Online publication: 28 May 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521874342.009
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • John Milton
  • Claude Rawson, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to English Poets
  • Online publication: 28 May 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521874342.009
Available formats
×