[Milton-L] Milton's quadricentenniel at the New York Public Library, an exhibition and a lecture series:

[McDonough, Donald (Emeritus)]

Here is the press release for NYPL's celebration of John Milton in 2008:

http://www.nypl.org/press/releases/?article_id=85: 


The Tumultuous Life and Enduring Influence of John Milton, Poet, Radical and Cultural Icon, Celebrated in Major Exhibition at The New York Public Library
John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life on view from February 29, 2008 to June 14, 2008
The New York Public Library presents the first major New York City exhibition in decades celebrating the 17th century poet John Milton, featuring beautifully engraved early editions of Paradise Lost, portraits, prints, and other rare materials never before seen by the public. John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life marks the poet's quadricentenniel anniversary, and will be on view at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street from February 29, 2008 to June 14, 2008.

Milton, whose literary reputation rivals those of Chaucer and Shakespeare, was avidly collected by two of The New York Public Library's founders, Samuel Jones Tilden and James Lenox. Fifty treasured items from the Library's collections will be on display, including illustrated 17th-century editions and documents; portraits, etchings, and watercolors; and musical scores and recordings. The exhibition emphasizes Milton's masterworks and reveals the different ways his legacy has been appreciated by artists, composers, and other interpreters and audiences.

"This exhibition reveals how uniquely malleable a cultural icon Milton has become," said Dr. William Moeck, exhibition curator and Assistant Professor of English at Nassau Community College (SUNY). "Because of his individual religious and political beliefs, Milton has been viewed contradictorily as libertine and reformer, patriarch and revolutionary, seeming orthodox or radical depending on the personal views of the reader. In the last hundred fifty years alone, his words have profoundly influenced Charles Darwin, Helen Keller, Malcolm X, Mark Morris, and numerous heavy metal bands. How many dead white males can claim as much?"
The exhibition surveys 350 years of Milton's influence, including adaptations, interpretations and parodies of his life and work, giving special attention to the 1667 narrative poem Paradise Lost. One of the great masterpieces of English literature, Paradise Lost was "the most self-consciously ambitious literary project imaginable," said Dr. Moeck. "Milton succeeded in telling a version of the story of Adam, Eve, and the forbidden fruit that was more memorable - in terms of language, plot, and characterization - than scripture itself. Although some questioned whether Milton was ruining sacred truths, his imagination proved equal to the challenge of syncretizing different myths of the Fall. If today, we study the Bible as literature, we have Milton largely to thank for it."

The first section of the exhibition explores Milton's life and those influences most affecting his development. Milton knew the biblical languages, along with Homer's Greek and Vergil's Latin, not to mention nearly every important literary artist working in the vernacular European languages from Dante onwards. Among the materials in this portion of the exhibition are a selection of remarkable artifacts, including Milton's 1647 letter to Carlo Dati, a Florentine nobleman; a 1660 broadside from King Charles II proclaiming the ban of two of Milton's political treatises; a 17th-century poem about angelology; and a 1736 pencil portrait of the blind Milton by Jonathan Richardson, Sr.

The second part of the exhibition is divided into three historical sections: Classical Milton, Romantic Milton, and Modern Milton. These show visitors how in each century, Milton's readers brought their own concerns, values, and biases to his poetry. For example, the famous literary critic Samuel Johnson perceived "contempt for woman" in Milton's poetry, confusing the misogyny of some of the characters with Milton himself. Yet English religious essayist Hannah More, one of Milton's early female readers, found in his representation of Eve a champion for woman's dignity. In the eighteenth-century Classical period, sixteen different editions of Paradise Lost were printed before 1732, all due to editor Richard Bentley's argument that corrections needed to be made since Milton could not have proofread what was dictated blindly to a secretary (Milton suffered the loss of vision early on in his career). A rare 1667 first edition and two copies the 1688 edition of Paradise Lost are displayed. The exhibition documents how the poem became an instant classic, with imitations, adaptations, parodies, and burlesques appearing soon thereafter. Artifacts included in this portion of the exhibition include the great neoclassical poet Alexander Pope's autographed copy of Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin; one of four extant copies of William Blake's Milton: A Poem in Two Books; and a beautiful hand-colored lithograph of the musk rose in Milton's "Lycidas," by Jane Elizabeth Giraud, the first female illustrator of Milton, published in 1846.

Milton wrote in every major genre of the Renaissance­-ode and sonnet, pastoral and elegy, drama and epic. Highlights of the exhibition's central display case include a rare 1667 first edition of Paradise Lost and two copies of the deluxe illustrated edition of Milton's epic published in 1688. Aside from Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671), Milton is celebrated for his strong treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica (1644). Drawing from the rich collections of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, John Milton at 400 is further enhanced by an ambient sound design featuring Milton-inspired compositions by Arne, Handel, Haydn, Penderecki, and heavy metal favorites, Cradle of Filth.
The New York Public Library's Milton materials rank among the most important collections in the world. The number of 17th-century editions and documents in the Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division, Rare Book Division, and Berg Collection can be compared with the holdings of any major library in the United Kingdom, while the variety of Milton portraits in the Beverly Chew Collection of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs would be the envy of any museum abroad.

Free Public Programs for John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life
Seating for these programs is available on a first-come, first-served basis. All lectures will be held in the Celeste Bartos Education Center in the Humanities & Social Sciences Library located on Fifth Avenue and 42nd street.
Lecture: John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life
Friday, March 21 at 2:15 p.m; Saturday, April 12 at 12:00 p.m.; and Tuesday, April 15 at6:00 p.m.
William Moeck, Assistant Professor of English, Nassau Community College (SUNY) and Exhibition Curator

John Milton is introduced as poet, man, and revolutionary in this talk by the curator of the current exhibition, John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life. William Moeck discusses images from the Library's extensive holdings of materials related to Milton, as he also emphasizes adaptations of Milton's masque Comus in song, dance, and the visual arts.

Lecture: The Father's Word, the Daughters' Freedom:Munkacsy's 'Blind Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to his Daughters'
Wednesday, March 26, 4 p.m.
William Shullenberger, Joseph Campbell Chair in the Humanities, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY

Legend has it that the aging Milton gave his three grown daughters a hard timeby requiring them to record his dictation of Paradise Lost. Mihaly Munkacsy's monumental "The Blind Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters" provides a different vision: intently listening, recording, and reflecting, the daughters emblematize the stages of women's intellectualliberation.

Lecture: Written to Aftertimes: Milton and the Durability of Verse
Saturday, April 5 at 2:15 p.m.
Gregory Machacek, Associate Professor of English, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York

In the passages of Paradise Lost depicting God as Creator, Milton conveys insight regarding the qualities by which human poetic works endure: that while the meanings of words may alter over time, verse poetry's existence as a rhythm is established in a nearly unchanging dimension of language. 
Lecture: Milton in Germany: From the First Translations to Goethe's Faust
Tuesday, April 8 at2:15 p.m.
Dr. Elizabeth Powers, Chair, Columbia University Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture. New York

Paradise Lost, Milton's "wondrous" creation, had a revolutionary effect on German poetics. It led writers away from the "imitation of nature" to more exalted concepts of the poet's role. Two beneficiaries of the revolution in poetry were Klopstock and Goethe, creators of major epics.

Lecture: Milton's Areopagitica and the Idea of Freedom
Wednesday, April 9 at 6 p.m.
Susanne Woods, Provost and Professor Emerita of English, Wheaton College, Norton, MA; Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of Miami

Milton's great essay on freedom of the press, ignored in his own time, became an iconic document of the civil liberty tradition as it developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This talk takes a fresh look at Milton's rhetoric of freedom and how that rhetoric was later used.
Lecture: Sonnets 19 and 23: A Reading of Milton's Blindness
Tuesday, April 22 at 6:00 p.m.
Lynne Greenberg, Associate Professor of English, Hunter College (CUNY)

John Milton, who went blind in midlife, wrote two particularly poignant sonnets, Sonnets XIX and XXIII,about his loss of sight. Rich repositories of autobiographical content, the sonnets also record his personal struggles over his vocation and the death of his wife. This talk will provide a close reading of both of thesepoems placing particular emphasis on the ways in which theyexperiment formally and structurally with the sonnet form.
Lecture: Mailer's Milton
Wednesday April 23 at 6 p.m.
Bill Goldstein, Founding Editor, New York Times Online Book Site; Book Critic, NBC's Weekend Today in New York

In On God, his final book, Norman Mailer acknowledges that his conception of Satan is indebted to Milton and Paradise Lost. This talk explores other connections between the two writers, focusing on their ideas about the role of God in human affairs, the portraits of Jesus in Mailer's Gospel According to the Son and Milton's Paradise Regained, and, in particular, on the ways in which Milton's prophetic voice is echoed in Mailer's Armies of the Night.
Lecture: Milton the Heretic
Tuesday, April 29 at 6 p.m.
John Guillory, Professor ofEnglish, New York University

What is heresy?Those who saw themselves as doctrinally orthodox in Milton's day often violently suppressed so-called heretics.This talkexamines the controversy over Milton's heretical positions by looking at several famously contested passages inMilton's poetry.His heretical version of Christianityrevealsthe deep fissures in Western monotheism that gave rise to sectarian conflict.
Lecture: Milton's Great Argument
Wednesday, April 30 at 6 p.m.
David Scott Kastan, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Paradise Lost has been thought of as everything from "England's greatest epic" to "a monument to dead ideas." This lecture attempts to show how vitally alive are the ideas that animate Milton's epic, which is arguably the most daring, passionate, and committed poem ever written in English.

Lecture: Milton, Marriage, and Myth in the Victorian Novel
Wednesday, May 7 at 2:15 p.m.
Gregory M. Colon-Semenza, Associate Professor of English, University of Connecticut, Storrs

Thistalk discusses how John Milton was reinvented as a husband, a father, and a man in popular nineteenth-century novels. These fictionalizations of Milton's domestic life engaged the period's major debates about marriage and divorce, and themeaning of marital bliss.
Support for The New York Public Library's Exhibitions Program has been provided by Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz I. and Adam Bartos, Jonathan Altman, and Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.
John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life will be on view from February 29, 2008 through June 14, 2008 in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery (first floor) at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library, located at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. Exhibition hours are Monday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday and Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. (through May 18); closed Sunday, March 23; and Saturday, Sunday and Monday, May 24-26. Admission is free. For more information, call 212-592-7730 or visit http://www.nypl.org/.

About The New York Public Library
The New York Public Library was created in 1895 with the consolidation of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox with the Samuel Jones Tilden Trust. The Library provides free and open access to its physical and electronic collections and information, as well as to its services. It comprises four research centers - The Humanities and Social Sciences Library; The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Science, Industry and Business Library - and 86 Branch Libraries in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Research and circulating collections combined total more than 50 million items. In addition, each year the Library presents thousands of exhibitions and public programs, which include classes in technology, literacy, and English as a second language. The New York Public Library serves over 16 million patrons who come through its doors annually and another 25 million users internationally, who access collections and services through its website, www.nypl.org.
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Contact: Jennifer Lam 212.592.7708