"More admired than read" is an amusing way of putting it. Conformity of opinion (and the alleged duty thereof) is something of a wicked wight itself, methinks.Originally Posted by Jackson Richardson
"More admired than read" is an amusing way of putting it. Conformity of opinion (and the alleged duty thereof) is something of a wicked wight itself, methinks.
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 07-20-2016 at 06:27 PM.
Cool. I will read Faerie Queene soon, after reading several epic poems. I do think that despite the difficulty I will be able to handle it. Many have loved it, like Coleridge, Hazlitt, Keats, Milton, Shakespeare, and many others.
Camille Paglia's essay "Spenser and Apollo" in her book Sexual Personae, has written about the sexual Apollonian power of the poem, and she ranks it as one of the finest works of sexual interest in Western literature.
Perhaps mortal will agree with me, those long poems, or the epic poems, demand action. (not just battle). Paradise Lost is an drama that accidentally is epic. People read because of the character (and a character that is present early in the book, lucifer is more interesting than satan), while Aeneas or Ulisses, despite being interesting, are so well know characters that we mind about what they do, rather how they think. Maybe that that was beyond Johnson take on Paradise Lost, a matter of style.
That is one of the things I tend to admire about epics, sagas, romances, and comicbooks. They tend to be the great action stories of their time. But I disagree that Paradise Lost doesn't have enough action to compete with The Iliad or The Aeneid. Just look at Book 6 and the war in heaven. First the army of angels fight with swords, then guns, then they start throwing mountains around paralleling the Greek myth of the Titanomachy. Then Jesus rolls in on a flaming chariot driving the rebel angels out of heaven single handed like Achilles. There's a lot more action in Paradise Lost than in say Dante's The Divine Comedy which is so full of philosophy that it's almost akin to something like Lucretius' On the Nature of Things.
As for The Faerie Queene by Spenser, I never finished that one. But it wasn't for lack of action. I seem to recall knights fighting witches and monsters, the same kind of fare you'd expect from the contemporary heroic fiction of the day (Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, The Death of King Arthur by Malory, etc). No, if I can recall what I didn't like about The Faerie Queene, and it's been a few years, it would have to be how long winded Spenser is. He took an awful long time telling rather simple tales and his story may have benefited from the kind of brevity that the Norse sagas exhibit.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
I didnt intend to imply there is no action in Paradise Lost, only how it is read, how the presence of Lucifer and his development is the great "postcard" for Paradise Lost. Sure, there is action, like most epics, but it is a bit like Shakespeare. We care for the characters, but there is fights... Or Moby Dick... There is a lot of action there, but we want Ahab. While Achilles and Ulysses are interesting, they really work more like comic book characters or King Artur, their dynamic is the dynamic of an action hero, Lucifer dynamic is different (of course, I know Jesus was supposed to be there hero, but such is life).
I wouldnt say the Comedy is an epic, it is something quite different. You mention Lucretius, I think of Ovid. Of course, despite Virgil being the guide, Ovid is everywhere because he was the wikipedia of classical mythology, but also, Ovid capacity to entangle histories... Dante is a bit like this, more an Altman or Tarantino than a Spielberg or Leone. No action except walking like a hobbit.
Are you saying that you think Paradise Lost is driven by the interior psychology of the character Lucifer? I don't know that he's any more psychologically complex than Achilles or Odysseus. You could say that the drama of the Iliad is the action between the Greeks and the Trojans, but there's just as much conflict and drama in the battle of wills between Achilles and Agamemnon. Achilles is a man of action but he's got a strongly written interior life, where you see that his soul is in turmoil, struggling between the desire for life and glory. Then besides the battles there are all the beautiful quiet moments in the story such as when Hector is holding his child Astyanax and the boy recoils in fear at his father's helmet, or when Priam goes to the Greek camp to beg for the body of Hector and he reminds Achilles of his own father and they both break down crying. Then there are the court intrigues on mount Olympus when Hera seduces Zeus. Those quiet intervals and character studies probably drive the narrative as much as the action.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
Not driven, no. More like from the overall perspective of the reader, Lucifer is the main atraction of Paradise Lost. Of Course, I am not claimming the Iliad is only action (that would make it a Silvester Stallone movie, in a single beat, boring) or that the characters are not complex. Nothing that radical. But when you think characters such as Achilles or Ulisses, we can buy their presence with the acts. You understand Achilles pain when he goes rampage after Hector. Lucifer does not behave like this, he behaves more like a Drama Character (as he some sort of Prometheus, it makes more sense). Maybe because Homer build his work over oral tradition, Milton over a literary tradition. We can compare Achilles with Priam, as Priam speech is a show of rethoric, just like most of Lucifer speech, but Priam is a secundary character than never steals the show from Achilles, Diomeds or Hector, while Lucifer steals from everyone else.
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