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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Miltonic Moment

Miltonic Moment

Evans, J. Martin

Hardcover

Series: Studies in the English Renaissance

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0813120608
ISBN13: 9780813120607
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: May 21 1998
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.81 Width: 5.79 Depth: 8.74
Language: English

Milton's poems invariably depict the decisive instant in a story, a moment of crisis that takes place just before the action undergoes a dramatic change of course. Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold. Martin Evans identifies this moment of transition as the Miltonic Moment.

This provocative new study focuses primarily on three of Milton's best known early poems: On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), and Lycidas. These texts share a distinctive perceptual and cognitive structure, which Evans defines as characteristically Miltonic, embracing a single moment that is both ending and beginning.

The poems communicate a profound sense of intermediacy because they seem to take place between the boundaries that separate events. The works illuniated here, which also include Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, are all about transition from one form to another: from paganism to Christianity, from youthful inexperience to moral maturity, and from pastoral retirement to heroic engagement. This transformation is often ideological as well as historical or biographical.

Evans shows that the moment of transition is characteristic of all Milton's poetry, and he proposes a new way of reading one of the seminal writers of the seventeenth century. Evans concludes that the narrative reversals in Milton's poetry suggest his constant attempts to bring about an intellectual revolution that, at a time of religious and political change in England, would transform an age.

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