| Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity Contributor(s): Teskey, Gordon (Author) |
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ISBN: 0674035097 ISBN-13: 9780674035096 Publisher: Harvard University Press OUR PRICE: $31.68 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: September 2009 Annotation: In this compelling account of divine Creation and human creativity, Gordon Teskey has brought Milton into modernity. Whether creative processes are closer to hallucinations or delirium, they are informed throughout by a spirituality that defies dogma. This book is an important contribution to Milton studies as well as to the rich discourse, from Plato to Heidegger, on the creative process itself. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Poetry - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh - Literary Criticism | European - General |
| Dewey: 821.4 |
| Physical Information: 0.6" H x 6.1" W x 9.1" (0.75 lbs) 224 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles - Chronological Period - 17th Century |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Composed after the collapse of his political hopes, Milton's great poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are an effort to understand what it means to be a poet on the threshold of a post-theological world. The argument of Delirious Milton, inspired in part by the architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, is that Milton's creative power is drawn from a rift at the center of his consciousness over the question of creation itself. This rift forces the poet to oscillate deliriously between two incompatible perspectives, at once affirming and denying the presence of spirit in what he creates. From one perspective the act of creation is centered in God and the purpose of art is to imitate and praise the Creator. From the other perspective the act of creation is centered in the human, in the built environment of the modern world. The oscillation itself, continually affirming and negating the presence of spirit, of a force beyond the human, is what Gordon Teskey means by delirium. He concludes that the modern artist, far from being characterized by what Benjamin (after Baudelaire) called "loss of the aura," is invested, as never before, with a shamanistic spiritual power that is mediated through art. |
Contributor Bio(s): Teskey, Gordon: - Gordon Teskey, Professor of English at Harvard University, is a preeminent scholar of Spenser and Milton. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost and author of Allegory and Violence, Delirious Milton (Harvard), and The Poetry of John Milton (Harvard), which won the Christian Gauss Award for literary criticism. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center, is an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America, and delivered the Kathleen Williams Lecture on Spenser at the International Spenser Society in 2017. |