An Equal Poise of Hope and Fear : A Fraternal Harmony of Extremes

This essay examines a dialogue between two brothers in John Milton\u27s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, arguing that Milton shows, in this first of two debates in the masque, what disputation can be when its purpose is persuasion, rather than the endless bickering he had found so unproductive at Cambridge

Casual Discourse Lost: The Separation of Adam and Eve

The critical separation scene between Adam and Eve in Book IX of Paradise Lost has long been something of a crux for Milton\u27s readers. Recent critical opinion of the passage has seen in it chiefly an indictment of Adam: for one group of readers, he ls the overbearing husband trying to suppress the burgeoning independence of his wife; for another, he fails as a spiritual leader in not suppressing that independence enough. I would like to offer an alternative reading of the passage by redirecting our attention to the simple dynamics of what we must remember is ultimately a prelapsarian debate between disputants who are, as a consequence, inherently guiltless. Rather than exploring who is most responsible for the loss of Paradise, Milton shows us chiefly in this scene what occurs in discourse when unfallen humans are simply unable to agree

Undivided Loves : Coordination and Coherence in Shakespeare\u27s Sonnets

This article analyses the structure of Shakespeare\u27s Procreation Sonnets (1-17), showing how an awareness of the transitions and connections that link the first seventeen sonnets into a coherent whole prepares readers to see similar units throughout the whole of Shakespeare\u27s Sonnets

That Silent Faubourg St. Germain: Ruskin and the Realms of Reading

On December 6, 1864, John Ruskin delivered at Rusholme Town Hall in Manchester a lecture entitled Of Kings\u27 Treasuries. Little more than a week later, he delivered in the same venue Of Queens\u27 Gardens, both of which he would publish the following year under the single title Sesame and Lilies. Seven days after his death on January 20, 1900, an obituary article appeared on Ruskin in a Parisian paper, authored by Marcel Proust, who would devote much of the next five years to a close study of Ruskin\u27s works and, though he knew very little English, to translating two of those works into French, The Bible of Amiens (1885) and Sesame and Lilies. As a recent biographer has claimed, This intense involvement with the works of Ruskin, entailing the study of French history, geography, architecture, and the Bible, was to prove crucial to the development of Proust\u27s own style and aesthetics (Carter 292). Indeed, the central idea of his Against Sainte-Beuve, an essay that evolved into what we know today as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time, restates one of the chief claims of Ruskin\u27s Of Kings\u27 Treasuries, that we should come to a work with no idea whatsoever of either our own preconceptions or anything we might know or assume about the author, that we will acquire the old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors to the treasuries of great literature only by putting ourselves always in the author\u27s place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his (30)

This Frightful World by Alexander Blok translated by Jason Curlin

Alexander Blok was one of the poets of a movement that would come to be known as the Silver Age of Russian Poetry and thus an avid Symbolist, in fact the leading Symbolist poet at this time. The poets in this movement, while maintaining in many places the strict rhyme of the earlier so called Golden Age, began to deviate from the strict meter of that time. These poets are products of their time, the earlier 20th Century, and were heavily influenced by those they found around them. This Frightful World was begun in 1909, a mere four years after many Russians lost hope not only in the Emperor and the current State but also in the Church.... This was the world in which Blok, an avid revolutionist in the beginning, lived and wrote. However, Blok himself was the son of a well-off family, his grandfather the head of the University of Moscow. Up to the late half of the first decade of the 20th century, Blok had literally only been writing about his almost religious devotion towards his wife. The tone of Blok\u27s poetry begins to change after 1905; his love is still his main focus, but it is only superficial and is there to stress the more major dialogue of the war and political changes. The poetry collection ends in 1916, the year when Blok is drafted into the military. Also while reading this, it is important to realize that Blok so idolized his lovely wife that he extremely limited his own sexual relations with her and instead had extramarital relations. He did this because he wanted to maintain her purity so that she wouldn\u27t fall in his eyes. So in a poem such as A Song of Hell, his guilt over sleeping with his own wife is actually real. He considered it a sin