The fascinating world of John Milton

Recently at Theology on Tap, Ben Myers gave a fascinating talk, Poetry and Truth: What John Milton means to me, focusing on Milton's classic poem, Paradise Lost. One measure of the success of a talk such as this is that it inspires the audience to go and read the original work. Ben certainly did this.

     The illustration is The Temptation and Fall of Eve by William Blake.

I did not know that Milton worked closely with Oliver Cromwell, who I find to be a scary figure. Milton wrote Paradise Lost towards the end of his life when he was blind, under house arrest, and after a tragic personal life where his first two wives died in childbirth. The dreams he had for an English government that was not shackled to the crown, and the church was not shackled to the state were dashed.
He knew that something was wrong with the world.
He took the story of Genesis 1-3 and creatively filled in the gaps to create an epic poem, now considered to be one of the greatest pieces of English literature ever.
Each of the 12 books begins with a summary. The summary for book 9 illustrates the creativity of Milton.

The only contemporary of Milton that is mentioned in the poem, is Galileo, who Milton did meet in person. The meeting is depicted in the painting above.

Satan's shield is compared to the moon seen through the telescope of the ``Tuscan artist.''

He scarce had ceas’t when the superior FiendWas moving toward the shore; his ponderous shieldBehind him cast; the broad circumferenceHung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose OrbThrough Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist viewsAt Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.

An interesting blog post, Milton and Galileo: Affinities between art and science, by Brigitte Nerlich states:

Many articles have been written about Milton and the telescope but I only want to quote from one by Marjorie Nicolson (1935): which claims that Milton never forgot the experience of looking through a telescope and seeing new worlds on the moon. This, she says, “is reflected again and again in his mature work; it stimulated him to reading and to thought; and it made Paradise Lost the first modern cosmic poem, in which a drama is played against a background of inter-stellar space”. 

The encounter with Galileo and the telescope left in fact many traces in Paradise Lost: “each of Galileo’s most famous discoveries is reflected in one or more passages in the epic. Among them are the countless newly sighted stars (7. 382-84), the nature of the Milky Way (7. 577-81), the phases of the planet Venus (7.366), the four newly discovered moons around Jupiter (8.148-51), the new conception of the moon (7. 375-78), the nature of moon spots (1. 287-9; 5. 419-20; 8. 145-48), and the nature of sun spots (3. 588-90)”. (Hunter, A Milton Encyclopedia, vol. 3, p. 120-121).