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:
“Mortals that would follow me,
Love vertue, she alone is free,
She can teach ye how to clime
Higher than the Spheary chime;
Or if Vertue feeble were,
Heav’n it self would stoop to her.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“He weren’t no saint—but at Jedgment
I’d run my chance with Jim,
‘Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it, thar an’ then:
And Christ ain’t a-goin’ to be too hard
On a man that died for me.”
—John Milton Hay (1838–1905)
“He all their ammunition
And feats of war defeats
With plain heroic magnitude of mind
And celestial vigour armed;”
—John Milton (1608–1674)