Epic Poets

"O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!"

"The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream — he awoke and found it truth."

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination — what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not."

"My chest of books divide amongst my friends."

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

"To his sight The husk of natural objects opens quite To the core; and every secret essence there Reveals the elements of good and fair; Making him see, where Learning hath no light."

"The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone! Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast."

"None can usurp this height... But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest."

"Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art — Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores."

"This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm'd — see here it is — I hold it towards you."

"Shed no tear! O shed no tear! The flower will bloom another year. Weep no more! O weep no more! Young buds sleep in the root's white core."

"When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in charact'ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love! — then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink."

"It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound."

"But were there ever any Writh'd not of passed joy? The feel of not to feel it, When there is none to heal it, Nor numbed sense to steel it, Was never said in rhyme."

"In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity."

"My spirit is too weak — mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky."

"Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong, And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song."

"But he, though blind of sight, Despised, and thought extinguished quite, With inward eyes illuminated, His fiery virtue roused From under ashes into sudden flame, [...] So Virtue, given for lost, Depressed and overthrown, as seemed, Like that self-begotten bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay erewhile a holocaust, From out her ashy womb now teemed, Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most unactive deemed; And, though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird, ages of lives."

"Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world."

"In the sure and flawless perfection of his rhythm and diction he is as admirable as Virgil or Dante, and in this respect he is unique amongst us. No one else in English literature and art possesses the like distinction. Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, all of them good poets who have studied Milton, followed Milton, adopted his form, fail in their diction and rhythm if we try them by that high standard of excellence maintained by Milton constantly. From style really high and pure Milton never departs; their departures from it are frequent."

"Milton, from one end of Paradise Lost to the other, is in his diction and rhythm constantly a great artist in the great style... That Milton, of all our English race, is by his diction and rhythm the one artist of the highest rank in the great style whom we have; this I take as requiring no discussion, this I take as certain."

"The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he Wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

"Now, more than thirty years ago, when I was very young indeed, in my beginning to think about public affairs, in reading the pure writings of John Milton, I found a passage which fixed itself in my mind. This passage time has never been able to take from my memory. He says, "Yet true eloquence I find to be none but the serious and hearty love of truth." And I have endeavoured, so far as I have had the opportunity of speaking in public, to abide by that wise and weighty saying."

"Paradise Regained—the work of a poet unsurpassed in any country or in any age, and a poem which I believe great authorities admit, if Paradise Lost did not exist, would be the finest in our language."

"No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light by the force of a judicious obscurity, than Milton. His description of Death in the second book is admirably studied; it is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors... In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree."

"We do not any where meet a more sublime description than this justly celebrated one of Milton, wherein he gives the portrait of Satan with a dignity so suitable to the subject... Here is a very noble picture; and in what does this poetical picture consist? in images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutions of kingdoms. The mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused. For separate them, and you lose much of the greatness, and join them, and you infallibly lose the clearness."

"A little heavy, but no less divine."

"Milton, on our account, is flawed, self-contradictory, self-serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious, and cunning. He is also among the most accomplished writers of the Caroline period, the most eloquent polemicist of the mid-century, and the author of the finest and most influential narrative poem in English. Janus-faced, he looks back to the world of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, and forward to Dryden and to Pope. He is driven by engaging enthusiasms—for the culture of Italy, for music, for in some way matching the life and work of Virgil. He knows his own worth, his singularity, his specialness. He is the most scholarly of poets, a master of classical culture and learning, a humanist in the great tradition of Hugo Grotius or John Selden, and he had a thorough appreciation of modern writers of continental Europe, and particularly of Italy. He studied law, mathematics, history, philology, and theology. He was also a thoughtful and innovative teacher."

"He argued that governments have no business meddling with the religious beliefs of their citizens; that how people worship and whether they worship should not be regulated by the legal machinery of the state. He also denied the right of his rulers to determine what could be printed and read. He claimed that marriage should be founded on mutual affection and intellectual compatibility and that, when those broke down, divorce should end the misery and permit both parties to attempt other relationships. He thought his rulers should be held to account for their actions and that the law was above them. He also contended the best kind of government was republican, an argument that has often prevailed, though not at present in his native land. Many of the civil rights on which modern democratic states are founded are adumbrated in his work. Revolutionaries in France appropriated Milton to their cause. Similarly, American statesmen such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams drew on their wide reading of Milton both to shape their republicanism and to address specific issues such as British taxation in America (for which Franklin drew a parallel with the Chaos of Paradise Lost), the case for ecclesiastical disestablishment in Virginia (for which Franklin drew on the anti-prelatical tracts) and the wickedness of British rulers (whose arrogance Adams compared to Satan's). In intellectual terms, Milton is one of the founding fathers of America."

"Breakfasted with Macaulay. He thinks that, though the last eight books of Paradise Lost contain incomparable beauties, Milton's fame would have stood higher if only the first four had been preserved. He would then have been placed above Homer."

"Milton's dream academy may strike us as a version of hell: repressive, prescriptive, elitist, masculinist, militaristic, dustily pedantic, class-ridden, affectionless. It is hard to imagine it would be endured by anyone as instinctively oppositional as its designer. What remains of interest about the tract [Of Education], though, relates to the critique it offers of Milton's own educational experience and to the disclosure it offers of his particular cultural assumption and concerns."

"Milton, perhaps to relieve the uniformity of English structure, which tends to become too barely evident in blank verse, tries often to imitate the classical order; but the result is an effect often of artificiality, at best of solemnity. Homer's Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεὰ, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος Οὐλομένην, and Virgil's 'Arma virumque cano, Trojæ qui primus ab oris,' &c., put the right words in the right place, without any loss of spirit. Milton's opening— Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, &c. is like an organ prelude: no English writer of a secular epic in blank verse could begin thus with success. It is impossible not to feel how tense must have been the struggle of that toil which Milton had to bestow on the stubborn material of his native language, before the gold of his words and verses won its full refinement. Diction so magnificent yet so severe cannot carry the reader along; so far from being the mere slave of the thought, like Homer's Greek, it is itself a marvel of study and meditation, which arrests and amazes him."

"Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life's common way, In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay."

"John Milton was one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place amongst the principal of our English Poets, having written two Heroick Poems and a Tragedy, namely Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Sampson Agonista. But his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his Memory will always stink, which might have ever lived in honorable Repute, had not he been a notorious Traytor, and most impiously and villanously bely'd that blessed Martyr, King Charles the First."

"The translation from Horace might, indeed, be termed the “version of the forty triumphs,” because there are at least that many prosodical marvels. The unrhymed lines that lap over like waves of music; the delicate beauty of the half-revealed assonance that takes the place of rhyme; the inverted stresses that afford a faint but perceptible trace of antique choriambic rhythm; the admirable spondees of...the stanza itself, Horatian and yet seemingly native English; the apt diction of melancholy—these are some of the treasures of this little poem. It is hardly too much to say that if by chance the rest of Milton's work had been lost, this translation would suffice to prove that he had been a great artist. Nowhere else in such brief compass is the evidence concerning what our literature gained from a study of the classic ode so impressively assembled."

"Americans needed at this time not so much intellectual arguments for basic positions as emotional symbols and detailed information addressed to specific issues in contest. Milton supplied both, but the strength of his imagery soon prevailed over the relevance of most of his principles. For Paradise Lost would soon become a main arsenal of propagandist devices, furnishing Americans with images and symbols which could rhetorically if not logically argue a cause."

"[A] puppy, once my pretty little man, now blear-eyed, or rather a blinding; having never had any mental vision, he has now lost his bodily sight; a silly coxcomb, fancying himself a beauty; an unclean beast, with nothing more human about him than his guttering eyelids; the fittest doom for him would be to hang him on the highest gallows, and set his head on the Tower of London."

"My Lord the Earl of Dorset] took it [Paradise Lost] Home, Read it, and sent it to Dryden, who in a short time return'd it: This Man (says Dryden) Cuts us All Out, and the Ancients too."

"Sir George Hungerford, an Ancient Member of Parliament, told me, many Years ago, that Sir John Denham came into the House one Morning with a Sheet, Wet from the Press, in his Hand. What have you there, Sir John? Part of the Noblest Poem that ever was Wrote in Any Language, or in Any Age. This was Paradise Lost."

"I...sate on deck during the whole voyage. As I could not read, I used an excellent substitute for reading. I went through Paradise Lost in my head. I could still repeat half of it, and that the best half. I really never enjoyed it so much. In the dialogue at the end of the fourth book Satan and Gabriel became to me quite like two of Shakspeare's men. Old Sharp once told me that Henderson the actor used to say to him that there was no better acting scene in the English drama than this. I now felt the truth of the criticism."

"If he exerted himself to overthrow a forsworn king and a persecuting hierarchy, he exerted himself in conjunction with others. But the glory of the battle which he fought for that species of freedom which is the most valuable, and which was then the least understood, the freedom of the human mind, is all his own. Thousands and tens of thousands among his contemporaries raised their voices against Ship-money and the Star-chamber. But there were few indeed who discerned the more fearful evils of moral and intellectual slavery, and the benefits which would result from the liberty of the press and the unfettered exercise of private judgment. These were the objects which Milton justly conceived to be the most important. He was desirous that the people should think for themselves as well as tax themselves, and should be emancipated from the dominion of prejudice as well as from that of Charles."

"The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions."

"An acrimonious and surly republican."

"To plead the cause of Freedom was, said Milton, his sole aim during the twenty years that followed the meeting of the Long Parliament. In one group of writings he upheld political freedom; in another the right to revise the moral and social code; in a third he called on the nation to establish religious toleration and to liberate the conscience from ecclesiastical supervision. Above all, in the Areopagitica, passing to the fundamental question which dominates all forms of liberty and is its final test, he pleaded with superb power and eloquence for the widest freedom of thought, for complete liberty, unhampered by censors or licensers, to reject, to choose and, if need be, to innovate and reform, because without that supreme freedom he felt there could be no health or progress in the moral and intellectual life of an individual or of a nation. “Give me the liberty,” he wrote, “to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties.”"

"But though in his noble and self-imposed task, the Defence of Liberty, Milton drew inspiration from the poets, orators and philosophers of Greece, nevertheless he stands proudly eminent as the great original genius who first proclaimed to our modern world the truth that freedom to express our thoughts in speech and writing is of all liberties most to be prized."

"'Better to rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven.' Eh, little brother-killer?" "Suh-certainly, Lord Lucifer. Whatever you say, Lord Lucifer." "We didn't say it. Milton said it. And he was blind."

"This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too."

"Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse... For whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme (which I have not now the leisure to examine) his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it."

"Milton's Paradise Lost is admirable; but am I therefore bound to maintain, that there are no flats amongst his elevations, when it is evident he creeps along sometimes for above a hundred lines together? Cannot I admire the height of his invention, and the strength of his expression, without defending his antiquated words, and the perpetual harshness of their sound? It is as much commendation as a man can bear, to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry."

"Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpassed; The next, in majesty; in both the last. The force of Nature could no further go: To make a third, she joined the former two."