Stanley Fish - Milton

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:

    See how from far upon the eastern road
    The star-led Wizards haste with odours sweet . . .
    —John Milton (1608–1674)

    How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
    Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
    —John Milton (1608–1674)

    O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious!
    Living or dying thou hast fulfill’d
    The work for which thou wast foretold
    To Israel, and now ly’st victorious
    Among thy slain self-kill’d
    Not willingly, but tangl’d in the fold
    Of dire necessity
    —John Milton (1608–1674)