Through Mazes Running: A Voice Worth Following
Our guest blogger today is the younger John Milton — before he ossified into the hidebound figure caricatured so devastatingly by Robert Graves in his remarkable feat of cross-gender ventriloquism, Wife to Mr Milton. As Colin Burrow points out in the latest London Review of Books, before Milton became Milton, there was an open, questing poetic mind, intoxicated with Spenser, alive with “calling shapes, beckoning shadows, airy tongues” — and with what Graves himself once called “the single poetic theme of Life and Death.” As Burrow notes: The quintessential early Miltonic moment is one in which a series of participles