![]() ![]() ![]() The war was between two parties: the Royalists, who supported the monarchical rule of King Charles I, and the Parliamentarians, who supported a more democratic rule.Īlthough these two parties both supported Protestantism, they had competing interpretations of it. The main dispute was over how England, Scotland, and Ireland should be governed. Zachary Davis: This war was both religious and political. When he returned to England, he found his country in crisis.Įrik Gray: In the 1640s and 1650s, England had a civil war. In the late 1630s, he went on the famous Grand Tour of France and Italy where he was able to visit the places and experience the religious traditions he had been reading about during his studies. Zachary Davis: Milton spent these years studying theology, philosophy, history, literature, science, and politics. And so after he finished his education, because his father had the means to support him, Milton simply retired and lived at his father's house and spent six years doing nothing but studying in order to prepare himself for his calling as a poet. Instead, he turned his full attention to his original calling: poetry.Įrik Gray: Milton decided, If I really am going to be the greatest, I have to study. Milton realized how much he prized freedom of thought and increasingly disliked the hierarchy of the established church. But near the end of his academic studies, he decided against putting on the clerical collar. Zachary Davis: Milton was also on track to become a minister in the Anglican church. And so, by the time he was at university-so, in his late teens-he already knew that he wanted to be a poet. But his real love was for the classics, and specifically classical poetry. He was, there was, there was really no area of human knowledge that Milton was not interested in and that he did not become conversant in. ![]() ![]() He had an insatiable appetite for all kinds of knowledge.Įrik Gray: And so he was reading voraciously in everything, in the classics, in science, when he traveled to the continent, he met Galileo. Zachary Davis: Milton studied Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Milton went on to Cambridge to study there and was extraordinarily gifted in languages. His father was a scrivener, which is to say something like a lawyer, and made enough money to get his son John a very good education. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Erik Gray to discuss John Milton’s Paradise Lost.Įrik Gray: Milton was born in 1608. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. It's a poem about the fall of humankind from a state of grace to a state of fallenness, and what could be more determinative of our current lives? So, that's what he's trying to achieve in both taking on the epic mantle, but also, in a sense, completely reinventing what epic can do. And by definition, everything that happens in this poem determines who we are today. Decades later, he wrote Paradise Lost, unquestionably the greatest epic poem written in English.Įrik Gray: His poem is set at the very beginning of the world. Zachary Davis: Incredibly, Milton’s prediction for his life came true. I don't know what I'm going to write, but I'm going to write it in English, and it's going to be the greatest poem that the world has ever seen.” If you can imagine what this would be like, it would be like your fourth grader’s up there in a chorus, you know, singing Christmas carols with their classmates, and all of a sudden they step forward for their solo and they start saying, “And let me tell you, I'm going to be the world's greatest poet!” It’s just absolutely extraordinary.Įrik Gray: I'm a professor of English at Columbia University. And right in the middle of this performance, he starts saying, “My muse, I know that you're there waiting for me, and I'm coming. While he was a student at Christ’s College Cambridge, he announced his vocation to the world while performing a poem he’d written in Latin.Įrik Gray: But then there's this strange bit where it turns, it turns to English, and he starts speaking himself. He didn’t know exactly what he would write, but he knew poetry was his calling. Zachary Davis: From an early age, John Milton knew he was going to be a poet. ![]()
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