Heading for The Gates of Eden...

...to quote Bob Dylan. I had a query about Milton's representation of the Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost. Perhaps I should set the record straight here.

The Garden of Eden is not in Heaven but on Earth. Adam is created from earth, on Earth, and placed in the Garden of Eden by God, who then creates Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. The Garden of Eden is indeed ‘heavenly’, and Satan even seems to think that Earth might be better than Heaven. It is only with the Fall, when Adam and Eve eat of the Tree of Knowledge and bring death into the world, that Earth becomes the squalid, miserable place of which we have first-hand experience!

The passage in which Satan expresses his thoughts about earth can be found in book 9, lines 98-178 (but look especially at 98-102). There is an interesting essay on the Garden of Eden here. It goes into much more detail than you need, but take what you can from it.

I'll take this opportunity to remind you too of a couple of other sites I've mentioned before:  the wonderful Darkness Visible, and the Luminarium pages on Paradise Lost. These are perfect revision aids! They are also much more trustworthy, accurate, and scholarly than sites such as enotes and sparknotes.There is also the text of a very interesting introductory lecture on Paradise Lost here. It discusses Paradise Lost as an epic, Milton's Protestantism, the critical debates about the poem, and the key characters.

Milton and the Epic Hero

Here's a link to a page that gives some good background to Milton's reworking of the epic tradition in Paradise Lost.

AN INVITATION

This afternoon some of us met to discuss the performance of George Peele's The Arraignment of Paris which we will be putting on in April, and to read through the text. Thanks to everyone who came along.

If you didn't come to the meeting but would like to perform in the play, or to help with scenery, costume design, music or any other aspect of the production, it is not too late! Simply let me know, or come along to our next meeting, which will be held on Thursday 6th January at 2pm.  Don't be shy...

More good Milton sites

Luminarium is a useful site, whatever you are studying: here is their page giving additional resources for the study of Milton. There are images, essays, articles and books online, and various other things you might find helpful.

You might also find interesting (if challenging!) this article on Milton by Frank Kermode, published in the New York Review of Books. Thanks to Meri for putting it in her bibliography exercise, and thus drawing my attention to it! Until his death in August, Frank Kermode was probably the best-known living English literary critic, and he's a wonderful read.

Darkness Visible

Cambridge University have put together Darkness Visible, a wonderful resource for reading Paradise Lost. It has sections on Milton's language, on the main characters, on illustrations of Milton's epic, and many others. It is all put together by Cambridge academics and students, and is written as an introduction for newcomers to the poem.
Another resource you might find helpful is this introduction to Paradise Lost, provided by Dartmouth College. It deals with Milton's cosmology, the poem's genre, ideas of God and marriage and many other topics.

I hope some of these are useful. Let me know if you find any other helpful material.

Paradise Lost-athons!

I thought some of you might be interested in the phenomenon of the Paradise Lost-athon. This is something that has become increasingly popular both in Britain and the United States, and probably elsewhere too. Basically, a group of students, staff and anyone else who is interested gets together to read Paradise Lost together, aloud - ALL OF IT!  Here is an example - one that recently took place at my old university, to raise money for the blind (a particularly appropriate aim, I think, given Milton's blindness). And here's another, from a few years back, in the States.

If enough of you were interested, we could perhaps do our very own Paradise Lost-athon at IKU, combining readings in English and Turkish, perhaps (and maybe a little French and Greek too?), and even a little dramatization. Always wanted to dress up as Satan? Normally refreshments and a fun atmosphere, and sometimes even costumes, are an important part of the event. Let me know if this is something you might want to do and I'll try to organise it. It's an excellent way to get to know the poem.

Run-on sentences

Run-on sentences were perhaps the single most common grammatical problem I came across when marking your midterms. I'm not going to fully explain what they are and how to avoid them here. If I identifed run-ons as a problem in your writing, though, I recommend that you look at this website. It gives a simple explanation of how you can join together separate, independent clauses. (You can also try the exercises; the answers are given on the same page).  In particular, note method 3. You cannot simply join two independent clauses with a comma; instead, you need a comma and a connecting word (e.g. and, but, or, for - when for means because). So, instead of writing

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip, she often beats him. 

you should write

Mrs Joe is cruel to Pip, and she often beats him.

or

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip; she often beats him.

or

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip. She often beats him.

I hope this helps a little.

More Milton resources

Here on google books is a good introduction to Milton. Have a look! Again, don't worry if some of it is difficult. You are not expected to read this for the exam. 

So, no more suggestions that I've forgotten about you!

'L'Allegro' and other Milton poems

I'm not sure if I've posted this link here before, but it's probably worth posting it again if I have. This is a site dedicated to John Milton. I think it will be very useful for those of you taking the 'Readings in Milton' course. The link I've posted here goes to the 'L'Allegro' page (someone emailed me asking for more material on 'L'Allegro'), but all of Milton's major poems are here.

The myth of Orpheus

Here is a link to a short summary of the myth as Milton would have known it. The main source for the myth is Book Ten of Ovid's Metamorphoses. You can find a prose translation into English here, with explanatory notes.

There are many, many representations and re-tellings of the myth of Orpheus in western art. One that might interest any of you with a passion for cinema is Jean Cocteau's film Orphée.  If you ever get the chance to see it, do! It was released in 1950, but a good case could be made for seeing it as fundamentally a 'modernist' work.

G. K. Chesterton, snobbery, modernism and Great Expectations

G. K. Chesterton was a novelist, poet, essayist and "prince of paradox" writing in the first decades of the twentieth century. He's a favourite writer of mine. He stands in a fascinating relationship to the Modernists. Here he is on modernism's obsession with 'making it new':

The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is especially up to date or particularly 'in the know'. [...] The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion (All Things Considered).
* * *
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. (Orthodoxy).

Nevertheless, his own work, especially his fiction, is in some respects wonderfully experimental and strange. His ideas about heresy and orthodoxy are also very interesting to read alongside Milton's views on these subjects.

I've just read his essay on Great Expectations, which I'd recommend. You can view the whole text at Project Gutenberg, here. In the meantime, here is a little taste:

In this book for the first time the hero disappears. The hero had descended to Dickens by a long line which begins with the gods [...] but Great Expectations may be called [...] a novel without a hero. [...] I mean that it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic.

Chesterton goes on to accept that this "must appear of course to overstate the case"- Pip is delightful, charming. But nevertheless, for Chesterton:

Most of Pip's actions are meant to show that he is not heroic. [...] The study of Pip is meant to indicate that with all his virtues Pip was a snob. [...] When he deals with Pip he sets out not to show his strength like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness [...]
All his books might be called Great Expectations. But the only book to which he gave the name of Great Expectations was the only book in which the expectation was never realised.

I might post a little more from Chesterton at a later date. He is excellent on the significance of Trabb's boy.

'Lycidas'

Here's a link to an introductory guide to 'Lycidas' on Google Books. Unfortunately only a selection of the pages are available, but I think these should prove helpful. I'll post more links to Milton material shortly.

Secondary reading

I'm sure you are all familiar with this, but just in case, here is a link to the university library website. You can access a wide range of reading material here. In particular, I want to draw your attention to EBRARY. You can search here for articles and book chapters related to your study, read them online, and even print them. There are lots of interesting things here on Dickens and the nineteenth-century novel, John Milton, Modernist poetry, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales...and pretty much anything else you are likely to study.

Especially if you are in the third or fourth year, you should be accessing this kind of secondary material - reading not only the texts themselves but also what critics and scholars have written about them. I know you have a lot of reading to do already. Reading critical studies and articles, though, will give you new insights, and make reading the primary texts - the poems, plays and novels - much more rewarding.

The image, by the way, is from the Ellesmere manuscript. This manuscript is famous for containing an illuminated (or illustrated) version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Here you can see the knight, the first of Chaucer's pilgrims to tell his tale.

Readings of Milton

Sir John Gielgud was one of the greatest English actors of the twentieth century. Here he is introducing John Milton's sonnet, 'Methought I saw my late espoused saint'. The sonnet itself is read by Ian Richardson, another great Shakespearean actor. You can also find readings of other Milton sonnets on this site, including 'On His Blindness', which we'll be looking at next week.

Breaking News: New Milton Poem Discovered...

...and it's a rude and perhaps not particularly good one. Whether it is really by Milton is still being argued about. It uses the sort of crude sexual innuendo typical of English students showing off to each other in the seventeenth century - and now.  Here's a link to Cambridge University's Centre for Material Texts blog on the poem, which also gives the full text - all eight lines of it.

Cover versions - from 'The Passionate Shepherd' to Hendrix, via Handel

I mentioned today Handel's operatic reworking of Milton's 'L'Allegro'. With Charles Jennens, who was responsible for the libretto, Handel created a 'pastoral ode' that intercuts 'L'Allegro' with  'Il Penseroso', in a way that brings out the argument between the two texts quite nicely. Stanford University has made the  complete libretto available online - you can see it here.

Jennens also added a third part, called 'Il Moderato', the moderate, although in doing so he has generally been seen (perhaps unfairly?) as misreading Milton's two poems. I think you can listen to Handel's version online at fizy.com - just type in 'Handel' and 'L'Allegro' and something should come up.
I also mentioned George Romney's painting of Mirth and Melancholy, inspired by Milton's poems. Here it is: you can form your own opinions about it.

On the subject of cover versions and adaptations, don't forget to check out Jimi Hendrix's version of 'Star Spangled Banner'.

Finally (for now!), if you haven't yet had enough of things related to Christopher Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd', have a look at Sir Walter Raleigh's 'The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd' and John Donne's 'The Bait'. 

One last thing - please feel free to leave any questions, observations, or ideas for other relevant reading/listening/viewing in the comments. Academic queries about the course, though, should be made to me in the usual ways, by coming to see me or sending an email.