Alan Jacobs Writes a Biography of “Paradise Lost”

We were in London in 2024, and I signed up for a London Open House tour that was right by our hotel. London Open House was a two-weekend event in which buildings not normally available to the public (or tourists) were open. Most, like this walking tour, required pre-registration.

 

The tour was fascinating. I had walked around these streets scores of times and never knew what had happened here. That rather ornate building around the corner – where Winston Churchill recorded all of his wartime addresses. That townhouse on a side street – the original building for the British Museum. That large stone mansion that backed to St. James’s Park – built by John D. Rockefeller as his London home. The rather nondescript office building across from the tube station – where Ian Fleming worked for MI-6 before he wrote the James Bond stories.

 

And right there, on a street named Petty France, was a Brutalist building housing the Ministry of Justice (it’s an ugly edifice; we call it the “Darth Vader Building”). At one corner is a small courtyard-like area. And right here, on this site, stood the house where then-blind poet John Milton (1608-1674) lived with his daughters and dictated the entirety of Paradise Lost. The only hint of this is the pub across the street, the one named the Adam and Eve. 

 

Paradise Lost is one of the works that everyone wants to say they’ve read but hope no one asks for details. The fact is that it is one of the great works of English literature, cited by many as equal to or greater than Shakespeare and Chaucer. It’s also one of the greatest poems written in any language.

 

But as Alan Jacobs points out in Paradise Lost: A Biography, the work is also something else, a kind of cultural bellwether. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“Sugaring,” poem by Raymond Holden and “Lay of the Trilobite,” poem by May Kendall – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Henry Hart’s Seamus Heaney’s Gifts – Matthew Ryan at Literary Matters.

 

Missing You – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

Flannery’s Music – poem by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell at Rabbit Room Poetry.

The Anonymous Spot with an Incredible History

If you like Brutalist architecture, and I don’t, an excellent example of it is the U.K. Ministry of Justice Building in London. It’s located near Buckingham Palace, where the streets of Petty France and Broadway converge. I’ve passed the building dozens if not hundreds of times, on my way to and from the St. James’s Park tube station. It’s right around the corner from where we stay when we visit London.

The complex was designed by Sir Basil Spence, a celebrated architect associated with the Modernist / Brutalist style (some call it the Soviet style). In fact, Spence has a plan to replace most of the government buildings in Whitehall with buildings like this one. Fortunately, the plan never became reality, except for this building which at its top resembles Darth Vader. At least Darth Vader had a personality.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

We Are in a Writing Renaissance – San Kahn at Compact Magazine.

 

Fall – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Twilight of the Hacks – Fred Skulthorp at the Critic Magazine.

 

"Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton by Joe Moshenska

John Milton (1608 – 1674) is one of those poets who seem to be largely ignored today. Shakespeare we still read and study; Milton, who was just as brilliant a writer as Shakespeare, comes with baggage, from a contemporary cultural perspective.  

For one thing, he was religious. For another thing, he was one of those Puritan-types, having even written a poem condoning the execution of Charles I. And a third thing was that he served in the British government under Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. Cromwell was so hated by the royalists that, upon the Restoration in 1660, his body was removed from its tomb in Westminster Abbey, hung, beheaded, and thrown into the Thames. 

 

The young John Milton

Milton was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. (Why does this sound so vaguely like current American politics?) And yet he had written some of the most beautiful poetry in the English language that Charles II relented and freed the blind poet after a few months. Ours was the benefit: Milton’s epics, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, still lay ahead, published in 1667 and 1671, respectively.

 

Joe Moshenska, professor of English literature at University College, Oxford, loves the works of Milton. His study, research, and teaching center in the 1500 to 1700 period in English literature. He received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University. He’s published Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (2014), The Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby (2016), and Iconoclasm at Child’s Play (2019).

 

And now Moshenska turns his full attention to Milton. Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton is a biography, of sorts. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Do You Know Where the First Amendment Comes From?

I didn’t learn this in journalism school.

Yes, I have to admit that my undergraduate degree was in journalism. LSU had an official School of Journalism at the time, so my diploma actually reads “Bachelor of Arts in Journalism.” It wasn’t just any B.A. degree, but a B.A. in Journalism. It helped journalism graduates feel superior to the rest of the graduating class who had plain B.A. and B.S. degrees; we needed to feel superior to something. Anything.

I took the perfunctory (and required) history of journalism course, and it was actually interesting and challenging. I had a good teacher, a particularly demanding teacher, and I was so impressed with him and liked him so that I also had two independent study classes with him. One was about the late 19^th century publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, a man named Henry Grady, who coined the phrase and articulated the philosophy of the “New South.” The other study course was about Vice President Spiro Agnew’s speeches attacking journalism and journalists.

The history course was quite detailed, and focused almost entirely on journalism in the United States. So we learned a lot about John Peter Zenger and the American Revolution, the rise of the “penny press” and yellow journalism, and the impact of modernism on journalism (think Walter Lippmann, and “objectivity” and “balance” as guiding principles; much has changed since I was in journalism school).

What we didn’t learn from our journalism history book was where the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution came from, the one that includes freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Those particular freedoms weren’t originally theorized after the American Revolution. And they didn’t all come from the famous libel trial Zenger found himself involved in. The ideas had been around for a long time.

I learned where they came from in my English literature course, not my history of journalism course. And I learned about it because one of the required readings was a small little paperback called The Areopagitica.

The Areopagitica is a speech by John Milton (yes, the far right fundamentalist wacko who worked for Oliver Cromwell!) (yes, the poet and Puritan intellectual who wrote Paradise Lost). It was a speech addressed to Parliament, and it’s on the importance of liberty for unlicensed printing. It’s a speech in which Milton argued that bad ideas shouldn’t be suppressed; that the only thing that couldn’t effectively counter a bad idea was a good idea; that truth would eventually prevail.

And he was religious. A Christian. His defense of unlicensed printing runs in a straight line through the Zenger libel trial in the 1730s through the American Revolution to the adoption of the First Amendment (and the other nine) half a century later.

I would argue that Milton’s defense of freedom of the press reflected his Christian beliefs, just like the fight to end slavery in Great Britain was led by William Wilberforce and other believing Christians. There’s much to consider there, and much to reflect upon.

I was reminded of The Areopagitica because I started reading Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me by Karen Swallow Prior. Starting next Monday (Jan. 7), Laura Boggess will be leading a discussion of Booked at The High Calling, covering the first three chapters. The discussion continues each Monday through Jan. 29.

Booked is about (surprise) books, but it is also part personal memoir, part discussion. It’s thought-provoking and even funny in parts. But most of all it’s about the importance of books in a life.

I identify with that. Books have been important in my life. So have speeches, with speechwriting having been a large chunk of my professional career. I’ve read a lot of speeches over the course of four working decades, one of them being The Areopagitica. It’s an important work. It had a lot to do with what we know today as journalism, the good and the bad, not to mention publishing in general.

And to think it came from John Milton.