Milton

Catalog description

This course will study John Milton, devoted student of power relations, a poet whose imaginative audacity and intellectual power have inspired three centuries of poets and other readers with wonder and chagrin. Milton is the premier poet of excess, a too-muchness that works, paradoxically, to convert plenitude into poverty and to subvert the possibility of measurement and comparison that reason requires. This subversion, the confusion between too much and too little–will be our theme as it was Milton’s. We shall read his major poetry and a little of his prose: *Paradise Lost*, *Paradise Regained*, *Areopagitica*, as well as such slighter works as *Comus* and “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.”