Milton
Fish started his career as a medievalist. His first book, published by Yale University Press in 1965, was on the late-medieval/early-Renaissance poet John Skelton. Fish reveals in his partly biographical essay, "Milton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour" (published in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . And It's a Good Thing, Too), that he came to Milton by accident. In 1963 — the same year that Fish started as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley — the resident Miltonist, Constantinos A. Patrides, received a grant. The chair of the department asked Fish to teach the Milton course, not with standing the fact that the young professor "had never — either as an undergraduate or in graduate school — taken a Milton course" (269). The eventual result of that course was Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; rpt. 1997). Fish's 2001 book, How Milton Works, reflects five decades' worth of his scholarship on Milton.
Read more about this topic: Stanley Fish
Famous quotes containing the word milton:
“They eat, they drink, and in communion sweet
Quaff immortality and joy.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“till disproportion’d sin
Jarr’d against natures chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d
In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience, and their state of good.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“The 5307th has collapsed. From a medical viewpoint, they’re finished as a fighting unit.... I have never seen human beings in such condition. They’re drained, physically and psychologically drained. I’m not tagging them for specific ailments. I’m simply marking every man in the outfit A.O.E.—accumulation of everything.”
—Samuel Fuller, U.S. screenwriter, and Milton Sperling. Samuel Fuller. Doc (Andrew Duggan)