My Fascination with the 17th Century

As part of my searching youth, I left  a potential  career in medicine--realizing that the cadaverous macabre blood filled experience was an anathama to me--and  gladly ran into the arms of John Milton's Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and then Andrew Marvel's The Garden, Picture of Little TC in a Prospect of Flowers and Horatian Ode on Cromwell's  Return from Ireland.

So I spent  two exciting years at Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences attending the 17th Century Seminar on Prose and Poetry conducted by Professor  Edward W. Tayler and wrote my Master's thesis on "The Imaginative Language of Milton's Samson Agonistes: The Psychosexual Tragedy of Samson."

As an introduction to John Milton's noble and uplifting poetic discourses on his life, the violent regicide and  civil war that marked the period and his efforts to "justify the ways of God to man" please read my three blogs to celebrate Milton Appreciation Week beginning with Sonnet Number 19:  "When I consider how my light is spent" 

Then you can get a taste of the sweet/bitter fruit of Paradise Lost in the next two blogs.

I hope you get into Milton, a wee bit, to start...

To be continued.....