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:
“Good luck is the gayest of all gay girls;
Long in one place, she will not stay:”
—John Milton Hay (1838–1905)
“List Lady be not coy, and be not cosen’d
With that same vaunted name Virginity,
Beauty is natures coyn, must not be hoorded,
But must be current, and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partak’n bliss,
Unsavoury in th’injoyment of it self
If you let slip time, like a neglected rose
It withers on the stalk with languish’t head.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“What thou art is mine;
Our state cannot be severed, we are one,
One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)