Milton's Words approaches John Milton in both an old and a new way,
focusing on his genius with words: keywords - the keys to a text or
a theory; words of sexual avoidance and distress; words of abuse;
words of privilege because 'Scripture'; big learned words; and
cunning little words, easily overlooked. After a short account of
Milton's life as a writer, Patterson guides us through most of the
poetry and polemical prose, all too often kept in separate
compartments. She shows how new challenges and crises required
shifts in vocabulary, as well as changes in Milton's views.
What do Milton's words look like when we acknowledge their freight
of personal and political history; when we track them from text to
text; when we consider not only the big, important, learned words
but also the very small ones, such as 'perhaps', which Milton
deployed with consummate skill at some crucial moments in both
poetry and prose, or the phrase 'he who', which replicates the
Latinate 'ille qui', but to which Milton gives a psychological
twist; when we consider not only word frequency, but infrequency,
uniqueness or near uniqueness, as a signal of Milton's interest in
a word; when we tackle these issues in the Latin texts for which
there is not, as yet, a concordance; when we consider the
possibility that certain words gain or lose value for Milton as he
proceeds through his writer's life, and that certain words become
keywords to a particular text, as 'book' becomes to Areopagitica;
when we reconsider the question of Milton's coinages not from the
stern legalistic perspective as to whether he should have made
them, but why he needed them? No one person could complete all
these tasks, and nobody would wish to read a book that appeared to
have completed them. Understanding Milton's words is, and should
remain, a work in progress.
But close attention to Milton's words is not all that this book
offers. It tells a slightly different story about Milton himself
than the ones we have been used to. Starting with an abbreviated
'writer's life', it explains the shape of Milton's writing career,
the life-long tension between his literary ambitions and the
pressure of exhilarating political circumstances. The Milton you
will find here walked no straight path from his Cambridge degree to
the epic he had been talking of writing when he was still at
university, but instead cut his teeth as a writer in an entirely
different field, political controversy. The effect on his
vocabulary of his campaign to reform his country's church
government and its divorce laws was galvanic, not least because he
had to reconstitute his own image from that of a shy and bookish
person to that of a crusader. He discovered that he enjoyed not
only verbal conflict, but also mudslinging, and rude words became
part of his arsenal in his very first prose tract. 'Marriage' and
'divorce', on the other hand, became loaded words for Milton for
personal reasons, and he developed a new set of verbal resources,
which Patterson calls 'words of avoidance', to help him tackle the
subject. He never got over the experience of writing the divorce
tracts. It was still on his mind when at the end of his life he
revised his Latin treatise on theology, De Doctrina Christiana.
Then, for about a decade, he was called upon to justify the Long
Parliament's execution of Charles I, which forced him to come to
terms with the political keywords of his generation, words such as
'king', 'liberty', 'tyranny', and 'the people'. When the republican
experiment collapsed on the death of Oliver Cromwell, after one
last brave salvo against the restoration of the monarchy Milton
retired back into the role of private intellectual and poet. This
we all know; but because the poetry and the prose have been
segregated for so long, and still tend to be read as separate
enterprises, we have not tended to track Milton's favorite
political words into the great poems, where, as we perhaps
unwillingly will see, they change their valence. In general, though
it is impossible to do justice to all of Milton's feats of word use
and arrangement, this book will tell a complete tale of Milton the
man; his psychological trajectory as well as that more formal
notion, his 'character'; his mistakes as well as his masterpieces.
General
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