Kirjahaku

Milton’s Paradise Lost is a profound exploration of the poet’s presence within his work, blending his role as a poet-prophet with the challenges of conveying grandeur and divine themes through poetic mastery. Milton presents himself as a figure of immense dedication, overcoming personal adversities, including blindness, to embody a sense of sublime confidence and humility. His voice, deeply imbued with strength and austerity, resonates through the poem, commanding attention and reflection while balancing personal convictions with the broader truths of art and morality. The narrative voice alternates between anonymity and distinct personality, enriching the poem’s texture with moments of vibrant clarity and deliberate mystery, compelling readers to confront both its complexities and Milton's creative force. Critics have long debated the depth of Milton’s self-revelation in the poem, with interpretations ranging from seeing him as a detached craftsman to an intensely autobiographical figure. Yet, Milton's ability to merge his identity with the universal themes of his work makes Paradise Lost not only a masterpiece of literary imagination but also a testament to the enduring dialogue between creator, creation, and audience. Through this interplay, Milton transcends simple authorial presence, engaging readers in an ongoing exploration of human and divine narratives, a conversation as relevant today as in its own time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Milton’s Paradise Lost is a profound exploration of the poet’s presence within his work, blending his role as a poet-prophet with the challenges of conveying grandeur and divine themes through poetic mastery. Milton presents himself as a figure of immense dedication, overcoming personal adversities, including blindness, to embody a sense of sublime confidence and humility. His voice, deeply imbued with strength and austerity, resonates through the poem, commanding attention and reflection while balancing personal convictions with the broader truths of art and morality. The narrative voice alternates between anonymity and distinct personality, enriching the poem’s texture with moments of vibrant clarity and deliberate mystery, compelling readers to confront both its complexities and Milton's creative force. Critics have long debated the depth of Milton’s self-revelation in the poem, with interpretations ranging from seeing him as a detached craftsman to an intensely autobiographical figure. Yet, Milton's ability to merge his identity with the universal themes of his work makes Paradise Lost not only a masterpiece of literary imagination but also a testament to the enduring dialogue between creator, creation, and audience. Through this interplay, Milton transcends simple authorial presence, engaging readers in an ongoing exploration of human and divine narratives, a conversation as relevant today as in its own time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Answerable Style was first published in 1953. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.By the use of both new and traditional techniques of critical analysis, Arnold Stein presents in this volume of six essays a fresh interpretation of Milton's epic. Beginning with the assumption that style is "answerable" to idea, he has tried to trace Milton's epic vision as it is bodied forth in patterns of structure (the ideas tested in action) and patterns of expression (the ideas tested in style). Mr. Stein explains: "My approach is in part based on an attempt to accept as fact both that I am a twentieth century reader and that this is a seventeenth-century poem. Milton is, I think, illuminated by some modern critical considerations; and some of those considerations are in turn illuminated, and some are found wanting."

John Donne's Lyrics was first published in 1962. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Combining modern insight with historical perspective, Professor Stein offers a fresh interpretation of Donne's lyric poems. His method is cumulative; it includes cross references to the religious writing, analysis of individual poems, and their relationship to larger patterns which reflect Donne's poetic mind. Among the specific problems he deals with are those which concern metaphor, symbol, myth, wit, "fictions." "negative theology," consciousness-and-simplicity, "binary" and "ternary" form in poetry, meter and meaning, rationalism and affective language, the visual and the auditory. Professor Stein demonstrates that to gain insight into the integrity of Donne's poetic mind it is necessary to take seriously two propositions: that Donne is a poetic logician endowed with a talent and love for the unity of imaginative form; and that Donne's poetry, though it is not simple, nevertheless deeply and persistently engages important problems which concern "simplicity." In one of his sermons, Donne wrote: "The eloquence of inferiours is in words, the eloquence of superiours is in action." Professor Stein maintains that in his best poems Donne aspires to the eloquence of action and never to the eloquence of words.Although the study is focused on Donne's lyrics, the interpretation is based on a long study of all the poems and the prose and on background and foreground materials. In a postscript the author discusses Donne's "modern career."

Perilous Balance was first published in 1945. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Heroic Knowledge was first published in 1957. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Professor Stein's critical work on Milton which was launched in his earlier book, Answerable Style: Essays on Paradise Lost, is completed in this volume. He devotes eight essays to Paradise Regained and five to Samson Agonistes. In addition, a preface explains his assumptions and a postscript connects and extends the implications of his work. The author's purpose and method are, perhaps, best described in his own words: "For the most part I have tried to demonstrate rather than to argue, and have (except in some notes) avoided engaging the established critical problems separately; but have instead trusted that a fresh critical interpretation of the poems would come to terms with the major problems while in motion, as part of a developing grasp of the integrated working of the poems."

Originally published in 1968. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that George Herbert is one of the great masters of lyric poetry. Stein discusses Herbert's diction, imagery, syntax, and rhythm in light of his organization of the imaginative materials of time and self-consciousness and in light of his development of a rhetoric through which he could master the intimacies of personal failure and (what is far more difficult) express in language convincingly sincere states of positive religious achievement.

Originally published in 1986. In The House of Death, Arnold Stein studies the ways in which English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imagined their own ends and wrote of the deaths of those they loved or wished to honor. Drawing on a wide range of texts in both poetry and prose, Stein examines the representations, images, and figurative meanings of death from antiquity to the Renaissance. A major premise of the book is that commonplaces, conventions, and the established rules for thinking about death did not prevent writers from discovering the distinctive in it. Eloquent readings of Raleigh, Donne, Herbert, and others capture the poets approaching their own death or confronting the death of others. Marvell's lines on the execution of Charles are paired with his treatment of the dead body of Cromwell; Henry King and John Donne both write of their late wives; Ben Jonson mourns the death of a first son and a first daughter. For purposes of comparison, the governing perspective of the final chapter is modern.