The Epic

[RiverNotch]

I find I admire Milton for his style---his blank verse reads very natural, even contemporary to us, compared to the more affected style of, say, Pope, and of course the particulars is consistently stunning---but his thought kinda bothers me. To compare, Shakespeare doesn't touch on these things at all---Dante is generally orthodox, so that when he diverges from orthodoxy by way of his fellow Westerners he is easy enough to dismiss---and Blake is so out there that he doesn't seem Christian at all, or else (as Frye interprets him) he circles back to orthodoxy by way of metaphor. But Milton is just orthodox enough in presentation that, summed up, nothing offends, but the details are so subtly infused with his Arianism or his more metaphysical version of Republicanism that the heterodoxy is impossible to reinterpret or dismiss.

Up next on my present reading list, I revisit Blake, who in terms of diction is more archaic than Milton, in terms of prosody is more forward looking, but in terms of subject matter just utterly baffles me.