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:
“Thus Belial, with words clothed in reason’s garb,
Counseled ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth,
Not peace.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Hid in the tangles of Neaera’s hair?”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“His legions, angel forms, who lay intranst
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades
High overarcht imbowr.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)