John Milton: Paradise Lost (1935); Paradise Regained, Minor Poems and Samson Agonistes (1937)

1938 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 432
Author(s):  
B. A. Wright ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Merritt Y. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
John Milton ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Paradise Regained

The Chronology of Milton's Major Poems

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 345-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Shawcross
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Paradise Regained ◽  
Important Study

The conclusion of Ants Oras as to the chronology of Milton's major poems, based on his important study of the blank vejse, is, I believe, in serious error. Examining strong pauses, both terminal and medial, the distribution of medial pauses over the pentameter line, run-on lines, feminine and masculine pauses, the distribution of polysyllables over the verse line, feminine endings, rhythmical expressions creating shifted stresses, syllabized “-ed” endings, and pyrrhic verse endings, Oras concludes that the traditional chronology for Paradise Lost (from Book I through Book XII), Paradise Regained (from Book I through Book IV), and Samson Agonistes is correct. As a prosodical study, the statistical data presented lead us to a greater understanding of the aforementioned verse techniques as used by Milton than we have heretofore known. Professor Oras' inferences of dated practice are, however, another matter.

John Milton and Musical Abjection

2019 ◽  
pp. 149-202
Author(s):  
Scott A. Trudell
Keyword(s):  
John Milton ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
The State ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Media Adaptation ◽  
Music Publishers ◽  
Authorial Voice

In John Milton’s works, music is a powerful instigator of unsettling modes of poetry. From A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle to Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost, Milton remains fascinated by the transformative potential of song, though he comes increasingly to eschew its uncontrollable qualities. In his later career, Milton found it increasingly pressing to subordinate music to his authorial voice. Yet his fantasies of bibliographic control did not prevent him from influencing the songbook movement of the 1650s or from becoming a source for Dryden’s unperformed opera The State of Innocence. Tracing Milton’s connections to his erstwhile collaborator Alice Egerton, to Cavalier songwriters including William Cartwright, and to music publishers including John Playford, Chapter 4 reveals that poetry retained its tendencies toward media adaptation notwithstanding the conflicted desires of poets.

Choosing a captain back for Egypt: Milton and the Restoration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Chernaik
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Paradise Regained ◽  
The One

Milton as a republican viewed the restoration of kingship in 1660 with dread. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, like the last two books of Paradise Lost, have a specific Restoration historical context, at a time of persecution of former commonwealthsmen and religious Dissenters. In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s protagonist struggles against despair, the feeling that he has been abandoned by God, while recognizing his own responsibility for the humiliating slavery into which he has been plunged. Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, published in a single volume in 1671, in their different ways both concern themselves with the problems and temptations facing those who seek to serve God in a hostile, unjust society. The two works explore alternative paths for ‘the spirits of just men long opprest’: in the one case, patience, suffering, bearing ‘tribulations, injuries, insults’ courageously, not expecting redress, and in the other, violent resistance, the slaughter of one’s enemies, in an ending of Milton’s tragedy which has often puzzled and disturbed readers.

‘Adventurous Song’: Samuel Butler, Abraham Cowley, Katherine Philips, John Milton, and 1660s Verse

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Samuel Butler ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Katherine Philips ◽  
Reward And Recognition

The decade after the Restoration saw the publication of several important works and collections of verse. Samuel Butler’s mock-heroic Hudibras satirized the civil war conflict, and although Abraham Cowley’s reputation was at its height, he lamented in his Pindaric odes the lack of reward and recognition for his hardships in the service of the royal family in exile. Katherine Philips’s poems were printed without her consent, and she was preparing an authorized edition when she died from smallpox. John Milton published his epic poem Paradise Lost in 1667, divided in 1674 to form twelve books, followed by Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes in 1671.

Milton and the Tragedy of Nations

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (4) ◽  
pp. 672-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Gregerson
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Paradise Regained

Milton's one venture into the genre of tragedy, Samson Agonistes, has prompted a notoriously divided reception among modern critics, not least because it revives the topos of exemplary violence, which the poet had conspicuously rejected in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. I propose we consider the underlying Samson plot not simply as the triumph or tragedy of a chosen nation and its representative hero but as the tragic collision between a universalizing faith and a nation's claims to exceptionality. Even after the devastating collapse of England's republican experiment, Milton never wavered in his commitment to the communal as well as the private manifestations of faith. The nation, or a nation equivalent, was an indispensable vehicle for continuing Reform, but the conceptual parameters of that nation, its relation to geographic place, and its rights in relation to other nations and to faiths other than its own posed a foundational dilemma for Milton's dramatic poem.

Vondel's Value as a Tragic Poet

PMLA ◽  
1905 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 546-566
Author(s):  
F. C. L. van Steenderen
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
The Other ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Paradise Regained

Joost van den Vondel is one of the few Dutch poets who have attained to anything approaching international fame. To him is attributed a rather noteworthy influence on Milton. As long ago as 1854 A. Fischel demonstrated in his Life and writings of Joost van den Vondel that Milton knew and made use of Vondel's works. Gosse, in his Studies in the Literatures of Northern Europe, pointed out that this influence came only from Vondel's Lucifer and was restricted to the sixth book of Paradise Lost. Edmunson, however, in his Milton and Vondel: A Curiosity of Literature (London, 1885), showed that not only in Books 1, 2, 4, and 9 of Paradise Lost, but also in Paradise Regained and in Samson Agonistes fragments are imitated from Joannes den Boetgezant (John the Messenger of Repentance), Adam in Ballingschap (Adam in Exile), Samson of the Heilige Wraak (Samson or the Sacred Vengeance), and from Bespiegelingen van God en Godsdienst (Reflections about God and Religion). Among the other discussions the most important are that of Masson in his Life of Milton, that of Professor Moltzer in Noord en Zuid (vol. 9), and that of Van Noppen in the introduction to his translation of Vondel's Lucifer.

John Milton

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Gimelli Martin
Keyword(s):  
John Milton ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Paradise Regained ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Christian Humanism ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Civil Contract

Milton’s religious outlook blends Christian humanism, including its dedication to close textual analysis, with idealistic, even futuristic or Baconian longings for a new, thoroughly reformed church and state. His most radical and unpuritanical ideas include ending state censorship, state support of the clergy, and clerical control of divorce, since he views marriage as a civil contract cancellable on grounds of incompatibility. Milton’s early prose and poetry express these ideas, but his most successful early poems blend Neoplatonic motifs of ascent with a strong moral emphasis on free choice. Paradise Lost continues that emphasis, but tempered by a vivid portrait of Satan and a deferred, if still sublime vision of heavenly reward. Its expanded epic cosmos reappears in Paradise Regained, but without the extraterrestrial landscapes or dynamic conflicts of the original. This chapter concludes that Samson Agonistes is truly ‘Greek’ in its tragic, meditative focus on self-betrayal, self-knowledge, and social renewal.

Milton and the Protestant Ethic

1961 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-57
Author(s):  
William Haller
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Protestant Ethic ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Paradise Regained ◽  
The Many

Mr. Frank's engaging argument is convincing up to a point. Milton was indeed a protestant of the protestants and in true protestant fashion kept pressing on in his thinking to ever more extreme conclusions which seemed to him of the very essence of rationality. Such a course pointed in one direction logically enough to the reduction of the many divagations of protestant doctrine to a religion of common sense free of dilemmas and miracles. But such a conclusion would seem more natural to minds seeking a repose that ever is the same from the uncharted liberties taken by protestant revolutionaries than to a poet whose devotion to protestant individualism was as unflagging as Milton's. Mr. Frank seems to me more convincing when he says that “perhaps the Milton who wrote Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes was more than an incipient deist, that he was what can be called a total Protestant.” But before one can say whether or to what degree Milton was even an incipient deist, surely one must consider what it amounted to in his case to be a “total” protestant, for not all total protestants turned out to be deists. In considering that question, since it was by way of their Pauline-Augustinian-Calvinistic theology that English protestants, not excepting Milton, arrived at their protestant ethic, it seems to me impossible to limit the term protestant as Mr. Frank suggests to its “ethical rather than theological signification.”

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