Milton: Man and Poet

Excerpt:

All the mass of acute and valuable matter written or compiled about Milton leaves eternally an unanswered question; a difficulty felt by all, if expressed by few, of his readers. That difficulty is a contrast between the man and his poems. There exists in the world a group of persons who perpetually try to prove that Shakespeare was a clown and could not have written about princes, or that he was a drunkard and could not have written about virtue. I think there is a slight fallacy in the argument. But I wonder that they have not tried the much more tempting sport of separating the author of L’ Allegro from the author of the _Defensus Populi Anglicani_. For the contrast between the man Milton and the poet Milton is very much greater than is commonly realized. I fear that the shortest and clearest way of stating it is that when all is said and done, he is a poet whom we cannot help liking, and a man whom we cannot like. I find it far easier to believe that an intoxicated Shakespeare wrote the marble parts of Shakespeare than that a marble Milton wrote the intoxicated, or, rather, intoxicating, parts of Milton.
Milton’s character was cold; he was one of those men who had every virtue except the one virtue needful. While other poets may have been polygamists from passion, he was polygamous on principle. While other artists were merely selfish, he was egoistic.


More Reading:
Other Books by G K Chesterton by ADB Publishing
(The Original) As I Was Saying
(The Original) Four Faultless Felons
(The Original) Tales of the Long Bow
(The Original) The Club of Queer Trades
(The Original) The Everlasting Man
(The Original) The Man Who Knew Too Much
(The Original) The Man Who Was Thursday
(The Original) The Napoleon of Notting Hill
(The Original) The Paradoxes of Mr Pond
(The Original) The Poet and The Lunatics Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale (1929)
(The Original) The Return of Don Quixote
(The Original) The Sword of Wood (1928)
(The Original) The Trees of Pride
BIOGRAPHIES:
(The Original) Charles Dickens
(The Original) George Bernard Shaw
(The Original) Leo Tolstoy
(The Original) Lord Kitchener (1917)
(The Original) Milton Man and Poet (This Book)
(The Original) Robert Browning
(The Original) Robert Louis Stevenson
(The Original) St Francis of Assisi
(The Original) St. Thomas Aquinas
(The Original) William Cobbett