400 years old and still dead...Happy Birthday, John Milton

...What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
and justify the ways of God to men.

John Milton, Paradise Lost book I, lines 22-26

If that doesn't sound much like me, that's because it's John Milton.

Not that many people care, but Tuesday is the 400th birthday of John Milton, poet, politician, civil servant and the bane of college freshmen who have had to plow through Paradise Lost for four centuries (it can take that long to read it).

Actually, I’ve always liked John Milton and Paradise Lost, ever since I first read this work back in high school. How I came to read Milton I’m not sure; he wasn’t included in the English Lit textbooks we were using and I don’t recall that we ever even discussed him. I do recall that at about this time I encountered a battered old copy of Paradise Lost at a used book sale, and I was hooked. (That’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?)

I remember back then I arranged a "multiple reading" for Forensics class that combined bits of Paradise Lost with bits of Jean-Claude van Italie’s play The Serpent. (To good effect, as I recall.) We took that reading to Regional competition, if I remember correctly.

I think I was the only person in my high school that had ever read Milton; certainly the only one among the students and possibly the teachers as well.

But even then I found Milton less than perfect; I didn’t think all that much of his poetic stile, and for the passages that I used I "rearranged" Milton to suit my own taste. I still have my original notes for that project; looking back, I have to admit that John Milton knew more about what he was doing than I did. But that’s all past.

Milton should be remembered for something aside from Paradise Lost; he also wrote Areopagitica: A speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England, a tract against censorship of which Wikipedia says, "Areopagitica is among history's most influential and impassioned philosophical defences of the principle of a right to free expression."

But it will forever be Paradise Lost that Milton is remembered for, even if hardly anyone has actually read it and of those that have few remember it well. And with some justification; though I respect his story and his characters, and I can appreciate his humor, reading his poetry can be like wading through molasses. Or at least I used to think so...since I’ve read so damn much Patrick O’Brian I find Milton much easier to get through.

So I’m going to say "Happy Birthday" to John Milton, and here’s to another 400 years of boring the pants off of students and teachers alike. With a little luck there may yet be one other out there who will find the same inspiration in his work that I have found.

The Blues Viking


Further Reading

John Milton on Wikipedia, Paradise Lost, Areopagitica

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.