> I’m not a big lit guy but I read this. The first 10% was hard to get through due to how different Milton’s english is from my own. I agree. Milton's English is beautiful but easily on the level of an unmodernized Shakespeare in terms of deterring a reader, who spends as much time cracking the puzzle as they do on any kind of esthetic appreciation. As an experiment, I was trying rewriting _Paradise Lost_ in contemporary blank verse with GPT-4/Claude-2. It was OK, but what I discovered was that what really works is an alliterative verse translation! (I was then informed that it is believed…
> He dictated the story of Paradise Lost to a scribe He had many aides, including his daughters, Anne, Mary, and Deborah. If you visit the NY Public Library there’s a large painting depicting Milton dictating to one of the daughters while the other two listen in: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/66760d80-c7f1-0135.... This is a popular topic and have been painted a number of times. In reality his relationship with his daughters was very strained, it is reported that he forced them to read to him works in languages they didn’t understand and their education was not a priority for…
If you want a short taste of Milton's verse, read sonnet 23. It'll help you to know that a) the literary reference isn't important to completely "get", b) he'd gone blind, c) his (first) wife had died from complications of childbirth, and d) this is a dream sequence. [I tried pasting it in, but can't persuade it to format itself in a way that will be readable. Here's the link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44746/sonnet-23-metho... Seriously, read it. The last line is unbearably beautiful and sad.] Milton also wrote poetry (well-regarded by those able to judge) in Latin, Greek,…
It only becomes better when you know the backstory of the author and the context in which it was written. John Milton was a talented diplomat who spoke multiple languages and was very well respected by his peers who admired him for his intelligence and good character. He supported a popular uprising against the incompetent king of England out of a sense idealism. The revolution was initially a success but the democratic government that should have replaced the king turned into an even more unpopular dictatorship. The monarchy was restored, most revolutionaries where executed and Milton was…
It is a much different read if you approach it with some prior knowledge of what it was intended to be. The preface plainly states that Milton wants to "justify the ways of god to men." The plot and structure are a direct knock-off of Homer's epic poems. Milton followed a regimen of writing that was old before he was born, in that first people would write lyrics and sonnets and then eventually hone their skills toward writing an epic. So there's not a whole lot of meat, for lack of a better word, in the structure of the poem itself. It is assumed that the reader knows their classics and…
> What I'm trying to tell you is that it's not easy for everyone. I think that's undeniably correct. > There is no amount of patience that I could apply to this pursuit that would yield success. I think that, however, is very likely incorrect. IMO, you need to develop patience with not understanding, and continuing anyway. Just read the play, see what you pick up, then read it again. Treat it like poetry and don't worry too much about understanding every word; see if you can get the feel. I found that Milton's Paradise Lost took me 3 or 4 false starts over a decade before I managed to get…
I really need to try Claude, but, well, so much to keep up with these days... FWIW, I've found that GPT-4 in the Playground is pretty good at creative text compared to ChatGPT-3, with a bit of prompting. It's still sometimes inflexible, but mostly works. (GPT-4 inherits a lot of the weaknesses of GPT-3 for creative text, unfortunately; you can fool yourself into thinking that it's genuinely learned to rhyme or what phonetics are, but underneath, it's still the same BPE-flaws.) I am still working on some projects there - I'm most excited about an experiment into translating John Milton's…
I don't think this is about "protect[ing] language from being captured by formal analysis", it's about calling out bogus analysis when you see it. This "vividness" analysis is bogus for two reasons: (1) The idea that individual words have objectively different levels of "vividness" completely divorced from context (when and where the novel was written, which character is speaking, etc.) is extremely debatable; (2) The idea that the "vividness" of individual words makes the novel as a whole "vivid" is a logical fallacy (compositional fallacy). I'm 100% behind the use of "formal analysis" to…
Milton supported the English Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell which ended up executing the king. But then the Commonwealth came apart and the Stuart monarchy was restored, putting Milton on the political outs. Many others who had supported the Revolution were executed when the new king came into power, but somehow Milton survived on the margins. The Hackett Classics edition of Paradise Lost does a good job explaining all of this in the introduction as well as the footnotes: https://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Lost-Hackett-Classics-Milton... Paradise Lost is one of the most beautiful poems in…
Favourite? I don't know... Blake? Poe? Various Japanese classics? Currently reading "Paradise Lost" by Milton. But what I've probably listened to most, lately, is Kate Tempest: I know now, first hand, That regretting love will empty you Of all that makes you love And all that lovers pay attention to. (Verse from "Best Intentions", Kate Tempest) It's interesting to see that many seem to have fallen in love with poetry that's been translated to English. While there's nothing wrong with translation, I do think it is a little curious that some seem to prefer translated…