[Milton-L] Symposium on Milton's Samson

[Carl Bellinger]

Thanks Salwa, Jim, Carol:

The reason for writing *anything* is an urge to express something within? I write to make others privy to something which otherwise remains cloistered within me?  If I recall accurately from Prof. Bate's lectures on Johnson, the author of our first dictionary put pen to paper for the cash. Why else, apart from vanity, would anyone bother?

But I want an answer to the question I asked, however short it may fall of thorniness. Paradise Lost shimmers everywhere with beauties of this kind. If we dislike them or don't notice them, how much of the *meaning* Milton was *intending* might we be missing? If meanings and intentions are discovered in Paradise Lost which have nothing to do with the blazing, coruscating rhetorical matrix which is the "composition of words" Milton fashioned in every paragraph, something must wrong it seems to me.  

"Subconscious intentions?" In other words, unintentional intentions? 

Hoping that someone will notice the hysteron-proteron format of this posting, which to be sure I labored over not for cash but for vanity, I remain cordially yours,

Carl


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Carol Barton 
  To: John Milton Discussion List 
  Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 9:25 PM
  Subject: Re: [Milton-L] Symposium on Milton's Samson


  1. I think you're remembering Empson, Carl. 

  2. Yes. Up to "true man." I think his intention was to present the credentials of the man who dared to "justify the ways of God to Man" (which was prerequisite to such writing, in his era).

  3. Above all else, Milton's "intention" was to COMMUNICATE: to make the rest of us privy to the vision in his head and heart--

  the same intention Stanley Fish had and has . . .

  the same intention that motivates me to post this message to the list.

  I've argued elsewhere that Milton sometimes has a hidden agenda, an "intention" beyond his seeming intention: that he's engaging in rhetoric as a performance, toward a specific end, and adopting certain stances more for their emotional currency than because he necessarily believes what he utters--especially in the so-called antiprelaticals, and "antimonarchicals."

  The subject is a very complicated one, but I do think that Milton "intends" every word that he writes.

  If he didn't, why would he edit, and re-edit, and publish? (If we didn't, why would we?)

  Best to all,

  Carol Barton


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