Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's IronyWhy do we hate Milton's God? Victoria Silver reengages with a perennial problem in Milton studies, one whose genealogy dates back at least to the Romantics, but which finds its most cogent modern expression in William Empson's revulsion at Milton's God and Stanley Fish's defense. |
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... readers—readers who have seen far more deeply into the poet's words than is usual. Originality here is not only impossible but ... reader why it may seem to do nothing much, because the argument addresses a phenomenon so seemingly. PREFACE.
... readers just as Milton himself does, with whose notorious character its vagaries are presumptively identified. On this head, Montaigne remarks that, in the conceptual affairs of humanity, we are inveterately caught between two modes of ...
... readers have had of Milton's justification in Paradise Lost, a preliminary scrutiny almost conventional to a certain kind of Milton study since Empson or even Walter Raleigh. Like Empson's introduction, it acknowledges the significance ...
... , they have tended instead to read it as symbolic and propositional— a poetic tractate if you will; and it is this supposition which ensures that there isn't much middle ground of opinion where Milton is concerned, with the readers.
... readers of the poem either vindicating or condemning what it more or less figuratively asserts, and loving or hating its author accordingly. Without seeking to exonerate Milton of what he says there (although it will inevitably appear ...