Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Paperback or Softback)

Teskey, Gordon

ISBN 10: 0674035097 / ISBN 13: 9780674035096

Verlag: Harvard University Press 9/1/2009, 2009

Beschreibung

Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity 0.75. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers BBS-9780674035096

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in ...

Verlag: Harvard University Press 9/1/2009

Erscheinungsdatum: 2009

Einband: Paperback or Softback

Zustand: New

Art des Buches: Book

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe:

Composed after the collapse of his political hopes, Milton's great poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are an effort to understand what it means to be a poet on the threshold of a post-theological world. The argument of Delirious Milton, inspired in part by the architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, is that Milton's creative power is drawn from a rift at the center of his consciousness over the question of creation itself. This rift forces the poet to oscillate deliriously between two incompatible perspectives, at once affirming and denying the presence of spirit in what he creates. From one perspective the act of creation is centered in God and the purpose of art is to imitate and praise the Creator. From the other perspective the act of creation is centered in the human, in the built environment of the modern world. The oscillation itself, continually affirming and negating the presence of spirit, of a force beyond the human, is what Gordon Teskey means by delirium. He concludes that the modern artist, far from being characterized by what Benjamin (after Baudelaire) called "loss of the aura," is invested, as never before, with a shamanistic spiritual power that is mediated through art.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor:

Gordon Teskey, Professor of English at Harvard University, is a preeminent scholar of Spenser and Milton. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost and author of Allegory and Violence, Delirious Milton (Harvard), and The Poetry of John Milton (Harvard), which won the Christian Gauss Award for literary criticism. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center, is an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America, and delivered the Kathleen Williams Lecture on Spenser at the International Spenser Society in 2017.