Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? - Hardcover

Smith, Nigel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674028325 ISBN 13: 9780674028326

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2008

Synopsis

With literature waning in the interest of so many, is Shakespeare the only poet the public can still appreciate? John Milton, as this book makes clear, speaks more powerfully to the eternal questions and to the important concerns of our time. The Milton of this volume is an author for all Americans―conservative, liberal, radical―not only because he was a favorite of the founding fathers, his voice echoing through their texts and our very foundation, but also because his visionary writing embodies the aspirations that have guided Americans seeking ideals of ethical and spiritual perfection.

Nigel Smith makes a compelling case for Milton’s relevance to our present situation. In direct and accessible terms, he shows how the seventeenth-century poet, while working to write the greatest heroic poem in the English language, also managed to theorize about religious, political, and civil liberty in ways that matter as much today as they did in Puritanical times. Through concise chapters that chart Milton’s life at the center of the English and European literary and political scenes―as well as his key themes of free will, freedom and slavery, love and sexual liberty, the meaning of creation, and the nature of knowledge―Smith’s work brings Milton, his poetry, and his prose home to readers of our day. A provocative and enlightening introduction, for newcomers and informed readers alike, this book rediscovers and redefines Milton for a new generation, one that especially needs and deserves to know him.

About this title

About the Author

Nigel Smith is Professor of English at Princeton University and editor of The Poems of Andrew Marvell in the Longman Annotated English Poets Series.

Reviews

The title is an attention-getting device. This isn’t a comparison of the two Renaissance colossi of English literature. It’s an explication of Milton on liberty, which Smith holds influenced modern notions of individuality and independence, especially through America’s Founding Fathers, whose prose, Smith says, is essentially Miltonic. Drawing on all the major prose as well as the poems, Smith highlights such Miltonic notions as the creativity of divorce, the absolute freedom of the press, the ineluctable viciousness of monarchy, the republic of virtue (which rather uncomfortably recalls Plato’s regime of philosopher-kings), and the division of creational responsibility within the Trinity. Finally, Smith asserts that, beautiful as Milton’s expression is (and close appreciation of many great passages of his poetry and prose is the most satisfying aspect of the book), his writings don’t contain a coherent structure of thought. Milton is consistent only in “inviting difference and dissent.” Perhaps that is why our perpetually rebellious pop culture compulsively references Milton, especially his Satan in Paradise Lost. An inquiry as fascinating as it is demanding. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674028325
• ISBN 13: 9780674028326
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240