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:
“What reinforcement we may gain from hope;
If not, what resolution from despair.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“So having said, a while he stood, expecting
Their universal shout and high applause
To fill his ear; when contrary, he hears,
On all sides, from innumerable tongues
A dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of public scorn.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Hail holy Light, of spring of Heav’n first-born,
Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam’d? since God is Light,
And never but in unapproached Light
Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence in create.
Or hear’st thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
Whose Fountain who shall tell?”
—John Milton (1608–1674)