英美文学选读学习笔记 John Milton

John Milton (1608-1674) was born in London. His father was both a scholar and a businessman. He was educated at St. Paul's School and Cambridge. After graduation in 1632, he spent six years at his father's country home on solitary study, greedily drilling the treasures over the fields of languages, literature, science, theology, and music. To complete his paration for his literary career, he started his travel on the Continent in 1638.

Milton once had an ambition to write an epic which England would "not willingly let die;" but when the English Revolution broke out, all his dreams were gone with the wind; he was entirely occupied with the thoughts of fighting for human freedom. He cut short his journey and returned to England to take part in the struggle for human liberty, thus putting his pen to the service of the revolutionary cause, and later of the Commonwealth. In 1649 he was appointed Latin Secretary to Cromwell's Council of State. Even when his eyesight was threatened with strains, he held steadily to his purpose of using his pen in the service of his country. Milton became totally blind in 1652. After the restoration of Charles II, he was imprisoned for a short time and then retired to private life.

With the Restoration all his labors and sacrifice for humanity were apparently wasted. Without anger or bitterness he went back to his early dream of an immortal poem and began with great pains to dictate his grand epic. Paradise Lost was finished in 1665, after seven years' labor in darkness. The  year Milton began his Paradise Regained. In 1671 appeared his last important work Samson Agonistes, the most powerful dramatic poem on the Greek model. Milton died peacefully in 1674.

Milton's literary achievements can be spanided into three groups: the early poetic works, the middle prose pamphlets and the last great poems. In his early works, Milton appears as the inheritor of all that was best in Elizabethan literature. Lycidas (1637) is a typical example, composed for a collection of elegies dedicated to Edward King, a fellow undergraduate of Milton's at Cambridge, who was drowned in the Irish Sea. The poem begins with grief and a feeling of immaturity; then the grief is deepened by the sense of irrecoverable loss in the silencing of a young poet. With this bitter sense of loss, Milton asks why the just and good should suffer. These emotions swell to a passionate call for the consolation of art. The poem moves from a sad aphension of death, through regret, to passionate questioning, rage, sorrow and acceptance. The feelings begin in a low key but move on to the large questions of spanine justice and human accountability. The climax of the poem is the blistering attack on the clergy, i.e. the "shepherds," who are corrupted by self-interest.

Milton devoted almost twenty years of his best life to the fight for political, religious and personal liberty as a writer. His powerful pamphlets written during this period make him the greatest prose writer of his age. And they can be compared with his achievement in poetry, at least not unfavorably. Areopagitica (1644) is probably his most memorable prose work. It is a great plea for freedom of the ss. Compared with the tough style of the other prose work, it is rather smooth and calm.

After the Restoration in 1660, when he was blind and suffering, and when he was poor and lonely, Milton wrote his three major poetical works: Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). Among the three, the first is the greatest, indeed the only generally acknowledged epic in English literature since Beowulf; and the last one is the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English.

Paradise Lost is a long epic spanided into 12 books. The original story is taken from Genesis 3: 1-24 of the Bible. The theme is the "Fall of Man," i.e. man's disobedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause -- Satan. In Heaven, Satan led a rebellion against God. Defeated, he and his rebel angels were cast into Hell. However, Satan refused to accept his failure, vowing that "all was not lost" and that he would seek revenge for his downfall. The poem goes on to tell how Satan took revenge by tempting Adam and Eve, the first human beings created by God, to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge against God's instructions. For their disobedience, Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise. They were sorry for what they had done and 'prayed to God. In the last book they were given the hope for redemption. The poem ended with Adam and Eve walking away from Paradise, hand in hand, and the gates of Eden were closed behind them.

Working through the tradition of a Christian humanism, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, intending to expose the ways of Satan and to "justify the ways of God to men." At the center of the conflict between human love and spiritual duty lies Milton's fundamental concern with freedom and choice; the freedom to submit to God's prohibition on eating the apple and the choice of disobedience made for love. Eve, seduced by Satan's rhetoric and her own confused ambition -- as well as the mere prompting of hunger -- falls into sin through innocent credulity. Adam falls by consciously choosing human love rather than obeying God. This is the error wherein his greatness lies. In the fall of man Adam discovered his full humanity.  But man's fall is the sequel to another and more stupendous tragedy, the fall of the angels. By lifting his argument to that plane, Milton raises the problem of evil in a more intractable form. Milton held that God created all things out of Himself, including evil. There was evil in Heaven before Satan rebelled: Pride, Lust, Wrath, and Avarice were there. At the exaltation of the Son these forces erupted and were cast forth. But God suffered them to escape from Hell and infect the Earth. And then the tragedy was re-enacted, but with a difference -- "Man shall find grace." But he must lay hold of it by an act of free will. The freedom of the will is the keystone of Milton's creed. His poem attempts to convince us that the unquestionable truth of Biblical revelation means that an all-knowing God was just in allowing Adam and Eve to be tempted and, of their free will, to choose sin and its inevitable punishment. And, thereby, it opens the way for the voluntary sacrifice of Christ which showed the mercy of God in bringing good out of evil.

Paradise Regained shows how mankind, in the person of Christ, withstands the tempter and is established once more in the spanine favor. Christ's temptation in the wilderness is the theme, and Milton follows the account in the fourth chapter of Matthew's gospel. Though Paradise Regained has many passages of noble thought and splendid imagery equal to the best of Paradise Lost, the poem as a whole falls below the level of the first, and is less interesting to read.

In Samson Agonistes, Milton again borrows his story from the Bible. But this time he turns to a more vital and personal theme. The picture of Israel's mighty champion, blind, alone, afflicted by thoughtless enemies but serving a noble ideal to the end, is a fitting close to the life work of the poet himself. The poet's aim was to sent in English a pure tragedy, with all the passion and restraint which marked the old Greek dramas. The whole poem strongly suggests Milton's passionate longing that he too could bring destruction down upon the enemy at the cost of his own life. In this sense, Samson is Milton.

In his life, Milton shows himself a real revolutionary, a master poet and a great prose writer. He fought for freedom in all aspects as a Christian humanist, while his achievements in literature make him tower over all the other English writers of his time and exert a great influence over later ones.