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.
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Famous quotes containing the word milton:
“Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam.”
—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)
“What call’st thou solitude? Is not the earth
With various living creatures, and the air
Replenished, and all these at thy command
To come and play before thee?”
—John Milton (1608–1674)