Without Lifting A Finger

The maturing John Milton, tending toward his mature works, is very serious:;) As in the invocation of the ‘heavenly Muse’ in the ‘Nativity Ode’, where the poet calls for his mouth to be touched by ‘hallowed fire’ from the angelic altar (line 28), Milton presents himself as a type of Isaiah, whose prophetic speech is released by a fiery coal placed against his lips by the one of the seraphim (Isaiah 6: 6–7). Milton’s lips are purified by holy fire but the ‘Vulgar Amorist’, whose desire is directed towards the body, is unable to control his physical discharges and so is implicitly feminized in terms of contemporary stereotypes of woman as ‘leaky vessel’.

The various poetic experiments and student exercises that Milton chose to preserve from his time at school and at Cambridge exhibit such an accelerated pursuit of the humanist ideal of the complete orator–poet. Milton’s character and career, as a writer of both poetry and prose, were profoundly influenced by the educational and cultural ideals of humanitas, in which he was intensively trained by private tutors and then at grammar school and university. Milton exemplifies the success of a humanist programme that sought to instil in students an ‘emotional commitment to antiquity and its repository of useful knowledge, which illuminated the human condition and guided behaviour’.29 The following chapters will show how the pursuit of humanist erudition was a key concern of his life up to the point in 1639 when, aged thirty, he returned from a fourteen-month tour of Italy to an England sliding into civil war. His dedication to the cause of liberty after 1640 was motivated less by ‘benevolenc...

Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 [ O.S. 7 September]  – 13 December 1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson , was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer . Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory , and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". [1] He is also the subject of "the most famous single biographical work in the whole of literature," James Boswell 's Life of Samuel Johnson . [2] Born in Lichfield , Staffordshire, Johnson attended Pembroke College, Oxford for just over a year, before his lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher he moved to London, where he began to write for The Gentleman's Magazine . His early works include the biography Life of Mr Richard Savage , the poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes , and the play Irene . After nine y...

Picked up (downloaded) Boswell's account of B & J's trip to the Hebrides (thought it might be fun to read before I go to Scotland in the summer -- nothing certain yet, and I certainly don't know if I'll have the chance to travel so far afield). Enjoying the read thus far. *** James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck ( / ˈ b ɒ z ˌ w ɛ l , - w ə l / ; 29 October 1740 – 19 May 1795), was a Scottish biographer and diarist, born in Edinburgh . He is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson , which the modern Johnsonian critic Harold Bloom has claimed is the greatest biography written in the English language. Boswell's surname has passed into the English language as a term ( Boswell , Boswellian , Boswellism ) for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print. In A Scandal in Bohemia , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's character Sherlock Holmes affect...