John Milton

Grace in the Garden: The Fall of Man & the British Pastoral Tradition

The transcendent ‘overcoming’ or reconciliation of the Fall of Man—that symbol of the cause of the disorder that we would wish re-ordered, of the return to the garden—is what great poetry graciously asks of us... “An intermediate...

The Hedonism of Reading Good Books

The hedonism of reading good books makes its mark on the meaning of a life, infusing it with a richness that can be had at no dearer a price than that of a library card—which is to say, it can be had for free by anyone who...

Books Are Not Dead Things

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy...

Has “Freedom” Lost Its Ring?

A mishandling of the word freedom, using it to mean license, liberty, or even anarchy, has made it as worn as a poker chip, as American novelist Walker Percy once said. When words become thus worn, “they don’t mean anything”...

On Studying Imagination

Is memory deceptively transformative? Is the original imagination an organ for lying fictions, for deception, or a conduit for revelatory illumination? And so, more generally, how do we explain those images that are apparently not imitations, don’t have an origin in verifiable originals, be they stored in...

“Song on May Morning”

Now the bright morning Star, Day's harbinger, Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her The Flow'ry May, who from her green lap throws The yellow Cowslip, and the pale Primrose. Hail bounteous May that dost inspire Mirth and youth and warm desire! Woods...

Rhetoric and Danger

As important as it is to use language well, it is more important to use it to move people with the truth... For two full days, with all regular classes canceled, the seniors at Wyoming Catholic College...

The World of the Poet

Man, it is often said, cannot jump over his own shadow. The poet—and by "poet" I mean a writer of imaginative works in verse or prose—leaps over the universe... Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. I

Is “Paradise Lost” a Christian Poem?

The concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian are famously invoked by Nietzsche in the context of Greek drama, but not in such a way that we can transfer them directly to poetry and prose. Let it suffice to say...

Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: Hidden Meanings?

Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur and such human acuteness as may wean one—and has even weaned me—from a lifelong exclusive Homerophilia. Partly its attraction is that it...

The Postmodern Heroism of John Milton

Instead of putting John Milton in the context of his own time, David Hawkes proposes in this study to put him in the context of ours. He refutes the anticipated charge that such an attempt...