Word: smith
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Smith dares to confront two big questions that most scholars nowadays scrupulously avoid: Does poetry matter? And, if it does, which poets matter most? His title promises us a kind of "Alien vs. Predator" battle of the titans whose winner will become master of the literary universe...
...World Wrestling Federation on a bad day. Shakespeare, the reigning champion, the headline attraction designed to draw in the punters, shows up for the photographers but never enters the ring. After the title and the first page, he almost entirely disappears, leaving us alone with Milton and his publicist Smith...
...Milton is the better poet, Smith contends, because he "places liberty at the center of his vision" (applause from the right), and because he "is explicitly dedicated to positive transformation in all spheres of human activity" (applause from the left). And, for good measure, he is "an indubitably ecological poet" - though this is the only sentence Smith devotes to that subject...
...Smith wisely lets Milton take the stand in his own defense. Ninety-nine extended quotations of Milton's poetry and prose account for 30% of the main body of the book. Many shorter passages are incorporated into paragraphs of Smith's own prose, so (if we don't count the index, bibliography and other scholarly packaging) maybe 40% of the words here are Milton's. Perusing these passages, it's easy to see why most of America's Founding Fathers "read Milton and revered him" - and even easier to understand why, for at least two centuries, Paradise Lost was widely...
...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...