1. John Milton--1608-1674
    1. Political involvement
      1. Iconoclastes--Icon/Idol breaker--Puritan
      2. Liberty: conscience, press, marriage
      3. Cromwell's Latin Secretary
      4. Didn't believe in complete separation of Church and State, or completely non-regulated religion
      5. Arrested by Charles II after restoration in 1660
      6. Experience of defeat of the Great Old Cause
    2. Humanist
      1. Languages, music, classical and biblical scholarship
      2. Travel in Italy
    3. Domestic
      1. Married three times
    4. Poetic
      1. Moral seriousness and puritan values in tension with pagan, philosophical [Galileo], and sensual inclinations
        1. two kinds of "Liberty"
      2. Pastoral to Vita Activa to Epic
  2. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso
    1. Conflictus or debat [see my chapter on this poetic convention in Youth Against Age (1984)]
      1. Classical singing contest
      2. Scholastic argument--dialectic/dialogue
      3. Classical rhetoric: et utramque partem--arguing both sides of a question
      4. Each poem begins with a repudiation and continues as rebuttal of the other
        1. Balance/polarity/comparison
        2. Contrast sounds and meters of 1-10 and what follows
    2. Copia--copiousness/elaboration
    3. Body of poems as tripping tetrameter--appropriate to "invitation" poems
    4. Lallegro
      1. Repudiation of spoil-sport Melancholy
      2. Birth and lineage--sexy conception by Venus and Bacchus
      3. Start of a pageant: Mardi Gras parade--"Crew"; masque; Mardi Gras vs. Lent
      4. Maying and Bacchus--signs of carnival and mirth
      5. Lark [vs. nightingale]
      6. Cock--morning; begins the temporal passage through the day 49
      7. Sunrise; pastoral setting and names--milkmaids; morning landscape moving to lunch [dinner]
      8. Music and dance--holiday 96
      9. Tale telling and going to bed--116
      10. Sudden switch to city and high level; pastoral to urban/court
      11. Still festive--chivalry, knights and ladies
      12. Then from court to the stage--Lydian airs of immortal poetry--sensual poetry 131
      13. Orphic, encourage Pluto to release Euridice
      14. Mirth's delights finally triumph over death
    5. Il Penseroso
      1. Repudiation of mirth--vain, deluding joys
      2. Divine, sage, holy, wisdom--not christian but philosophical--beauty of darkness; "Goth"
      3. Saturnine lineage--born of coupling between Saturn and his daughter
      4. Pensive nun, rapt soul, holy passion--heavenly depression
      5. Peace, Quiet, retired leisure 49 Contemplation
      6. Nightingale not lark--Keats
      7. Wandering under the moon--solitude
      8. Soounds of the curfew toll across the lake--Romantic sublime
      9. Spirit of Plato
      10. Tragedy--not comedy
      11. Sunrise is cloudy and then go into dark groves of the wood
      12. Dreaming, cloister, dim religious light 160
      13. Dissovle me into ecstasies
      14. Celebration of old age, hermitage, old experience, prophetic strain
      15. But no resurrection
  3. Aereopagitica
    1. To Parliament--the antiroyalist, anti Anglican church body of government--for the liberty of unlicensed printing.
      1. Insistence on Spiritual and intellectual freedom; anti-authoritarianism grounded in spiritual strenuousness
    2. *Knowledge of good and evil is not separable; "knowing good by evil"--see Paradise Lost
      1. Choice impossible without knowledge of evil
      2. Cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue
      3. We bring ort innocence into the world….that which purifies us is trial…by what is contrary 1747
      4. A blank virtue not a pure
      5. Scanning error is necessary to contemplation of truth
      6. This is benefit of books promiscuously read
        1. The bible is is dangerous book and was proscribed by papists
      7. Need to distinguish laws from persuasive means of regulating society
      8. God created temptations to teach us; moved us from Paradise for our good
      9. Reason is but choosing; no virtue or reason is possible without choice
    3. *Licensing is inquisitioning--English are the origin of Reformation
      1. To license books is to act like Papists--the episcopal arts begin to bud again 1749
    4. Faith and knowledge thrives by exercise
    5. *Being told what to believe is the easy and slack way out of real religious commitment
    6. *Truth was hewed into a thousand pieces at the death of Christ; we are all involved in the process of putting it back together 1751
    7. We need to be searching together and tolerating differences --we English are the chosen people--all the lord's people are become prophets 1755
    8. Truth is strong--leave her room
    9. Truth appears in many shapes
    10. Be tolerant, but don’t tolerate Popery, which kills all tolerance
    11. New enlightened steps in the discovery of Truth. [anti catholic churd's treatment of Galileo--intellecgtual as well as religious freedom to allow progress toward truth.
    12. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
      1. Any disagreements with Milton? What about the Catholics?
      2. Where are the limits of what can be published?
      3. Absolute freedom of the press and religion?: What about Nazis, Bomb makers, pedophiles?
      4. What about knowing good by evil--where does this apply and not apply?
        1. Sex, drugs, crime?
        2. Disobedience and testing?