Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
- Messages
- 9,271
There may be some Chrons people who have a mild intention of reading Milton -- Paradise Lost, "l'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Lycidas," Comus, etc. Here's a place where we can encourage one another to act on that wish, because he really is one of the great fountainheads of imaginative literature. The linked article
How John Milton Invented Science Fiction in the 1600s
makes a case for him as possessing, at least, a proto-science fictional sensibility.
I suspect (or in some cases know) that he's been influential on some of our favorites. It seems to me J. D. Worthington cited evidence of Lovecraft's interest in Milton within the past few years. It's certainly there in C. S. Lewis, and I wouldn't be surprised if Milton was an important author for David Lindsay, who wrote A Voyage to Arcturus.
Thinking in terms of Edmund Burke's treatise (which draws on Milton), I'd say that the beautiful is that which pleases us by its harmony, its shapeliness and pleasing color, its good order and proportion, its never-failing capacity to delight, while the sublime is that which evokes a pleasing sense of awe or even terror, as when we stand at the edge of a great precipice looking down, or when we see and hear the storm-frenzied ocean, or contemplate depths of darkness or echoing emptiness. Right from the beginning of Paradise Lost, which I have just begun to read again, the poet evokes sublime imagery in the ruinous fall from heaven to remote hell of satan and his host, into darkness and torment. Satan and his warriors are colossi.
To begin reading Milton with Paradise Lost may be a daunting prospect. I might suggest that readers new to Milton start with his much briefer masque, the enchanting fantasy Comus, with its delectable synthesis of Greek mythology and woodsy British folklore.
Here's a text of Comus with plentiful black-and-white and color illustrations by Arthur Rackham!
Comus
How John Milton Invented Science Fiction in the 1600s
makes a case for him as possessing, at least, a proto-science fictional sensibility.
I suspect (or in some cases know) that he's been influential on some of our favorites. It seems to me J. D. Worthington cited evidence of Lovecraft's interest in Milton within the past few years. It's certainly there in C. S. Lewis, and I wouldn't be surprised if Milton was an important author for David Lindsay, who wrote A Voyage to Arcturus.
Thinking in terms of Edmund Burke's treatise (which draws on Milton), I'd say that the beautiful is that which pleases us by its harmony, its shapeliness and pleasing color, its good order and proportion, its never-failing capacity to delight, while the sublime is that which evokes a pleasing sense of awe or even terror, as when we stand at the edge of a great precipice looking down, or when we see and hear the storm-frenzied ocean, or contemplate depths of darkness or echoing emptiness. Right from the beginning of Paradise Lost, which I have just begun to read again, the poet evokes sublime imagery in the ruinous fall from heaven to remote hell of satan and his host, into darkness and torment. Satan and his warriors are colossi.
To begin reading Milton with Paradise Lost may be a daunting prospect. I might suggest that readers new to Milton start with his much briefer masque, the enchanting fantasy Comus, with its delectable synthesis of Greek mythology and woodsy British folklore.
Here's a text of Comus with plentiful black-and-white and color illustrations by Arthur Rackham!
Comus
