John Milton
1608 - 1674

poet and revolutionary

  

"I cannot praise a

fugitive and cloistered

virtue, unexercised

and unbreathed,

that never sallies out

and sees her 

adversary. . ."

       Aeropagitica
Author of some of the most
morally challenging and exquisitely
crafted lines in English,
Milton very consciously set out to be the greatest writer who ever lived.
As startling as we may find that ambition, even more 
shocking
is his
success.

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade,
And strictly meditate the thankles Muse,
Were it not better don as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of Noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes;
But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears,
And slits the thin spun life. But not the praise,
Phœbus repli'd, and touch'd my trembling ears;
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to th' world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfet witnes of all judging Jove;

                                                    Lycidas

Almost as famous as Milton's poetic genius is his reputation as a misogynist.

 

Virginia Woolf's famous essay, 
A Room of One's Own, offers "Milton's bogey" as that thing which women need to get past to live and survive as writers and readers. At the end of her talk to Cambridge women, she observes that a talk by a woman to women should end with something unpleasant. To provide this, she returns to the story of Shakepeare's unknown sister, Judith, she who would have been more brilliant than her brother had she but been a man.

"I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so--I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals--and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves;

 

.

 
 
     

"He for God only,
Shee for God in him."
Paradise Lost



if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without thateffort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while."

 

 

 
   
   

As an undergraduate, a Masters student, and a PhD candidate, I hated Milton. Well, he was easy for a woman to hate back in the 70's and 80's as the women's movement was taking off. My ABD job was at Illinois State, and while I was there I had the wonderful chance to take seminars in Chicago at the Newberry Libray, one of the most wonderful places on the planet. The seminar that Michael Leib conducted was a turning point/watershed/Damascus road for me. Suddenly I got the point. So I started working on Milton, first on Paradise Lost in the epic tradtion, tying in with a wonderful epic seminar at Princeton with Tom Roche. It was a natural progression for me to look at gender issues in the poems, but the place of Milton's work in western intellectual history was even more fascinating than gender. As Rosanne Rosanadana used to say, "It just goes to show: there's always something."

my subsequent Milton work:


"Only the Phoenix Has a Womb: Samson and the Homeless Women of Israel," an invited essay in The Altering
     Eye: New Perspectives on Milton's Samson Agonistes, edited by Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich.
     (University of  Delaware Press, 2001).
Medusa's Mirrors: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Metamorphosis of the Female Self University of Delaware
      Press, 1998. [a redaction of the Eve chapter appears in The Norton Critical Paradise Lost, third edition, edited
      by Gordon Teskey]
"The Poetics of Anti-text and the Politics of Milton's Allusions." SEL: Studies in English Literature 37 (1997)
      151-71. [winner, Milton Society's James Holly Hanford Award: the most distinguished Milton essay of 1997]
"Eclipsing Shakespeare's Eikon: Milton's Subversion of Richard II." The Journal of English and Germanic
      Philology XC (January 1991) 51-60.
"Milton and Galileo: The Art of Intellectual Canonization." Milton Studies XXV (1989) 109-123.
Milton and the Idea of Woman, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
"The Idea of Milton and the Idea of Woman," in Milton and the Idea of Woman, 1-15.
"'For each seem'd either': Free Will and Predestination in Paradise Lost." Milton Quarterly , XX(1986) 13-16.

for the forth-coming Milton Encyclopedia (Yale, 2008) I was asked to write the following entries:
major entries:           Eve, gender, sexuality, women
Milton’s texts:         sonnet VII, Letter to a Friend (1633)
standard entries:      Elizabeth I, Galileo
minor entries:           Deborah, Fiesole, Florence, Siena, Tuscany

major conference papers:

"In the Neighbourhood: Space, Place, and Time in Milton's Early Works," The 9th International Milton Symposium, Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of Milton's Birth, London, July 2008

“Sabotaged Chronology in Paradise Regained,” The British Milton Seminar, Birmingham, March 2007.

“The Liberty of the Radical Act: Samson in Time.” Eighth International Milton Symposium, Grenoble, France, June 2005.

"When Is a Queen not a Queen? Milton and Elizabeth I" Sixth International Milton Symposium, York, England, July 1999.

"Milton and the Medusa Interpolation." Fifth International Milton Symposium, University of Wales at Bangor, July 1995.

"Milton's Allusions and the Challenge of Un-reading." The Third Cambridge Colloquium on Early Modern English, St. Catherine's College, Cambridge University, April 1993.

"Heretical Truths and Second Readings: Milton's Elitist Anti-texts." The Milton Seminar, April 1993.

"Milton's Mask, Pornography, and the Revocation of Chronological Absolution." The British Milton Seminar, University of Birmingham, March 1993.

"Anti-text and Milton's Politics of Authoritative Revisionism." The British Milton Seminar at the Conference on English Politics and Culture 1520-1660, University of Reading, England, July 1992.

"'without wing of Hippogriff': Text, Inter-text, Anti-text in Milton's Poetry." Convention of the Modern Language Association, December 1991.

"Discourse as Intercourse: The Ludlow Mask as Intellectual Pornography." Convention of the Modern Langague Association, December 1990.

"'No grave upon the earth shall clip in it/ A pair so famous': Cleopatra and Elizabeth." Conference of the Renaissance Society of America, April 1990.

"Gendering the Geography of Eden." Tenth Annual Le Moyne Forum on Religion and Literature, September 1989.

"Galileo: Milton's Patron Saint of Intellectual Freedom." The Third International Milton Symposium, Florence and Vallombrosa, June 1988.

"'For each seem'd either': Free Will and Predestination in Paradise Lost." LeMoyne Forum on Religion and 17th-Century Poetry: A Symposium in Honor of Joseph H. Summers, October 1983.

 
"Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man."
A. E. Housman