What’s unnerving about Guillermo del Toro’s "Frankenstein" is that it embraces and glorifies the creature in ways that remind me, on one hand, of the Romantic valorization of Milton’s Satan, and on the other, of our contemporary headlong development of artificial intelligence. Like Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (not a great play), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (not [...]
John Milton’s “ancient liberty” is not the liberalism of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, where the telos governing human liberty is dispensed with. Rather, “Paradise Lost” cultivates Christian virtues by reclaiming an ancient liberty within the traditional epic verse form and by returning to that which is first or most ancient: Divine Will. The opening [...]
As you set out on the adventure of reading Milton’s "Paradise Lost," note the difficulties, overcome them and enter that Miltonic range and reach of mind that is one of the greatest poetic spaces of the English tradition. Even if you do not agree with Milton that that space is a space of damnation or [...]
Does “Paradise Lost” succeed as a poem qua poem, but not as a didactic theological poem? If we lived four hundred year earlier, might we suggest Milton pit Satan primarily against St. Gabriel or St. Michael? The concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian are famously invoked by Nietzsche in the context of Greek drama, but not [...]
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 nature... prevents the universe falling into two separate halves.” —Plato, Symposium (203b). Almost from the beginning of when human [...]
I disagree on certain points with two literary giants, Dante and John Milton. Though unworthy to follow in their literary footsteps, I feel nonetheless that even giants are fallible. Is it possible to argue without quarreling? G.K. Chesterton thought so and did so. He said of his relationship with his brother that they were always [...]
Even without the content of the general historical frame, William Wordsworth’s sonnet, “London 1802,” is moving to every generation that reads it, and it is natural to compare our current political situation with the one described in the poem. All of us, of course, remember the dire circumstances of England in 1802. No? Then we [...]
The origins of human things are flawed, no question, and inequalities remain. But should we not try to honor the principles of Washington or Jefferson and distinguish them from the prejudices of the day that they shared? The curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College has much wisdom to offer in the current crisis, much that should [...]
John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is an intense, passionate poem, and erotic poem. From the visual imagery to the descriptive language Milton uses to portray his lively scenes, there is no escaping the reality of the life force that moves his poem. Why, however, did Milton choose to write such a poem, and to whom was [...]
Instead of putting John Milton in the context of his own time, scholar David Hawkes proposes to put him in the context of ours, believing that the great poet and political writer’s life and work offer solutions to our own predicament. John Milton: A Hero of Our Time, by David Hawkes (356 pages, Counterpoint, 2010) [...]
I keep having the sense that something is going on that runs right counter to the overt text of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. There seems to be a separate, opposed meaning. Should it be called a hidden agenda, a subtext? Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur and such human acuteness as [...]
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 is not so foolish as to fail to [...]
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 and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as [...]
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 human memory or laid up with the Muses [...]