Studying anything at all that has a kind of distance from our moment is the thing
that will actually give you some perspective on what's happening right now.
Any kind of cultural context that has some foreignness, some strangeness
will then by comparison bring certain aspects of our own moment in high relief.
I'm Feisal Mohamed.
I'm a professor of English specializing in early modern English literature
especially people like Hobbes, Milton, and Marvell.
The 17th century was the time when in so many ways the modern world took shape.
This is a period of mass social upheaval.
It's a period of mass migration.
It's a period of civil war.
It's a period when the king was executed and England began a great political experiment.
And that's the setting of the writers I study.
Milton was not just a great poet, this titanic figure in English poetry.
But also he was a great poet-revolutionary.
He was the first English thinker to defend in print the execution of King Charles I.
Studying Milton draws us out of casual assumptions we might have about what it is that poetry does.
We tend now to think of poetry as beautiful and useless, to borrow a title.
That's not at all how Milton thought of poetry.
For Milton it was both beautiful and transformative.
The way that Milton knows intimately the entire European literary tradition leading up to him...
Everyone from Homer and Virgil up to writers of his own moment...
The amount of knowledge that he had was simply staggering.
And he can draw on all of it and use it as a weapon as it were to write a work of literature
that defiantly says
all of the other epic poets conceived of the project of epic poetry incorrectly.
This is the epic truly married to truth.
And to use that truth as a weapon against the restored English monarchy, the restored English church...
That's a sort of energy within a work like Paradise Lost that I find endlessly fascinating.
There's no other great poet who had Milton's revolutionary investments.
There's no other revolutionary who is so great a poet.
Yes, he was a radical.
No, we would not want to join him in his particular radical vision.
And this is where one's relationship to Milton gets complicated.
You can admire his revolutionary energy even as you see that the particular revolution
he was fighting for is not one you would want to join.
What Milton really wanted looks to us now like an oligarchy of white male protestants.
So the content of his ideas we would want to disown.
And yet the activist energy you can still admire
especially in its relationship to poetic achievement.
You can't divorce one from the other.
And I think that we can hold those two things in our head at the same time.
We can say this is brilliant even as we say this guy was kind of a jerk.
And yet I still admire him as a great writer and thinker.
I think these writers become a lot more interesting
when we're willing to look at the good and the bad
and to see them in their full complexity.