Word: miltonized
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...irritated others, who found her not up to the standard of 2007’s Bill Gates or 1943’s George Marshall. Rowling may well prove to be an inspirational speaker. But she is certainly both an enthusiastic borrower, in the fine tradition of Shakespeare and Milton and other great authors who creatively recycled mythic themes and characters, and also a shameless copyright bully, who has brought charges against one of her biggest fans, Steven Vander Ark, for his plans to publish a Harry Potter lexicon. By the standard of Rowling’s complaint, Joseph Campbell could...
...said Stock. “I’m delighted he’s going to be here.” After Harvard, Bernanke earned his Ph.D. at MIT, where he specialized in the monetary origins of the Great Depression. At a 2002 celebration for the economist Milton Friedman—who had long blamed poor monetary policy for exacerbating the Depression—Bernanke famously said, “Regarding the Great Depression, you are right, we did it. We are very sorry.” After finishing graduate school, Bernanke held teaching positions at MIT and Stanford Business...
...quotations take up so much space because Milton's most characteristically impressive sentences can fill an entire page. Milton is the Michael Jordan of English poetry. You can't believe it's possible for anyone to remain airborne for so long, and the breathtakingly bravura suspension culminates in a verbal slam-dunk like "So never more in hell than when in heaven" or "sweet reluctant amorous delay" or "Again transgresses, and again submits...
...those glorious long sentences are part of the explanation for the slow decay of Milton's reputation. He's not a poet for the sound-bite century. Consider the famous passage from Paradise Lost, describing Eve in Eden, which is one of the culminating exhibits in Smith's celebration of Milton. The 20-line sentence contains 20 proper names: Enna, Prosperin, Dis, Ceres, Daphne, Orontes, Castalian, Nyseian, Triton, Cham, Ammon, Lybian Jove, Amalthea, Bacchus, Rhea, Abassin, Amara, Ethiop, Nilus, Assyrian. How many people nowadays (even among the exceptionally well-educated readers of TIME) know what all those words mean...
...Milton makes even smart people feel stupid. Not by accident, either. He is probably the most unrelentingly aggressive poet in English. When Samson says, "My heels are fettered, but my fist is free," he displays the best and worst of Milton. The best is Milton's unsurpassed technical command of English: the double contrast of "heels ... fettered" against "fist ... free"; the long vowel in "heels" echoed by "free"; the alliteration of "fettered ... fist ? free"; the combination of all three effects in the verse-ending stressed monosyllable "free," so ironically spoken by a blind slave in chains, but also...