Almost from the start Milton writes with uncanny fluency in a cluster of inherited literary languages: the language of the ode, the hymn, the love elegy, the sonnet, the masque, the pastoral elegy, the georgic, the oration, the epic. But his unique achievement is to stretch the range of these languages to cope with powerful new threats to the traditional ideas of human dignity and natural order-threats that haunted his culture and (in thinly disguised modern versions) continue to haunt ours. We’ll try to develop enough fluency in reading Milton’s languages to keep up with the stretching, and appreciate the disturbing and powerful art it makes possible.

Part of this fluency is knowing how to spot our modern worries in their seventeenth-century disguise. So we’ll try to cover the relevant history, and read a fair sampling of the libertarian prose Milton devoted to subjects like educational reform, divorce law reform, tradition and individual reason, just revolution and just political order, freedom of speech and thought, and-most basic of all-the poet’s maverick interpretation of what Christianity has to say about the divine nature, human nature, and human destiny.

But our main way of learning to read Miltonese will be to watch it in the making, by moving chronologically through Milton’s major work in each kind, from the Nativity Ode to the great Biblical tragedy and epics. Throughout our close encounters with these poems we’ll try to use both close reading and formal analysis to expose the disturbing contradictions that plague Milton’s (and maybe our) way of looking at the world, above all the conflict between the materialist and the humanist notions of what freedom and dignity are all about. And we’ll try to figure out how Milton’s intellectual defeat manages to bring him artistic victory: the most brilliantly sustained expression of the sublime in English literature.

There will be a mixture of lecture and discussion. The major student obligations will be a midsemester paper and exam, and a final paper and exam.