what are you reading now?

luka said:

i want to do paradise lost lets do that soon

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luka said:

Ezra Pound thought Milton was a load of shit and you can see where hes coming from. looked at in a certain light he is pretty poor.

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'In Ezra Pound's more concrete argument, Milton does "wrong to his mother tongue" by writing

"Him who disobeys me disobeys,"

when he means

"Who disobeys him disobeys me,"

and he does so because he is "chock a block with Latin" (ABC 51; the quote is from V.611-12). The imputation is that of slavishness, of Latinism for Latinism's sake, which, because of Milton's great influence on subsequent generations, results in what Eliot calls "the deterioration—the peculiar kind of deterioration—to which he subjected the language" (258). Few of these attacks are argued in a comprehensive manner, or with examples, but tend to imply, rather, that Milton and his supporters are somehow low. This is about more than just Latinism, as one of Eliot's more vicious ad hominem attacks shows:

Either from the moralists' point of view, or from the theologian's point of view, or from the psychologist's point of view, or from that of the political philosopher, or judging by the ordinary standards of likeableness in human beings, Milton is unsatisfactory. (258)

Ultimately, the anti-Miltonist position is less useful as a starting point for a discussion of Latinism in his poetry than as a reflection of the attitude towards language favoured by the Modernist project (Pound: "1. Direct treatment of the `thing' whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome" [Literary 3]), itself a continuation of the Romantic impetus towards what Wordsworth called "the language really spoken by men" (254).'

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Still, they pursue this aim by very different courses. The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.

At the bottom of both the Greek and the Hebrew notion is the desire, native in man, for reason and the will of God, the feeling after the universal order, -- in a word, the love of God. But, while Hebraism seizes upon certain plain, capital intimations of the universal order, and rivets itself, one may say, with unequalled grandeur of earnestness and intensity on the study and observance of them, the bent of Hellenism is to follow, with flexible activity, the whole play of universal order, to be apprehensive of missing any part of it, of sacrificing one part to another, to slip away from resting in this or that intimation of it, however capital. An unclouded clearness of mind, an unimpeded play of thought, is what this bent drives at. The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.

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