Teachers' Resource Web

Notable Statements about Milton

Home | Questions | Guides | Links

Al Drake, UCI, English 28A, 1994

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters; altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

From Wordsworth's Poetical Works. ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. 244

The Paradise Lost though so fine in itself is a corruption of our Language--it should be kept as it is unique--a curiosity, a beautiful and grand Curiosity. The most remarkable Production of the world--A northern dialect accommodating itself to greek and latin inversions and intonations.

From The Letters of John Keats, Volume Two. Ed. Hyder Rollins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. 212.

Nothing can exceed the grandeur and the energy of the Devil as expressed in Paradise Lost. . . . Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy--not from any mistaken notion of bringing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity but with the open and alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments." (from "An Essay on the Devil and Devils.

From Shelley's Prose. Ed. David Lee Clark. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988. 267.)

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or Reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling. And being restrain'd, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah. And the original Archangel, or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is call'd the Devil or Satan, and his children are call'd Sin & Death. But in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah is call'd Satan. For this history has been adopted by both parties. It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss. This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter, or Desire, that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than [the Devil. del.] he who dwells in flaming fire. Know that after Christ's death, he became Jehovah. But in Milton, the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses, & the Holy-Ghost, Vacuum! Note: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. William Blake. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. Plate xvi. (I have not preserved the original layout of the plate.)

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

From "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young." Chameleon, Dec. 1894. cf. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper, 1966.

The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. . . .In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.

From "The Metaphysical Poets" in Selected Essays of T.S. Eliot. New York: HBJ, 1978. pg. 247.