>Three Poets, in three distant Ages born,>Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.>The First in loftiness of thought surpassed;>The Next in Majesty; in both the Last.>The force of Nature could no farther go:>To make a third she joined the former two.>—John Dryden, "Epigram on Milton", 1688Was he right about Milton?
>>24682621I only read Milton in translation.
>>24682621Milton has less than 10 good poems
>>24682621Yes and no. In the English tradition Milton is really exceptional and I can't blame someone for being over-enthusiastic about him, but he's not a perfect poet either and in that respect not comparable with Homer or Virgil.
>>24682639so does Homer
>>24682648Homer has over 30 not even counting the epics
>>24682646Homer and Virgil aren't perfect
>>24682646>>24682658The Italy guy is Virgil and not Dante?
>>24682664Das rite
>>24682621I disagree with that terrible rhyming of two and go.Dryden? More like Try again
>>24682621Honestly I think people drool over Milton because it was bold and unconventional in both style and content back then but there are other authors I prefer. Besides, a bit happened since Homer outside England, in case some don't know.
>>24682670>Besides, a bit happened since Homer outside England, in case some don't know.like what
>>24682672Virgil
>>24682675Dante's literally in the poem
>>24682676I thought it was the other way around with Virgil being in Dante's poem
>>24682672Up to the 17th? All renaissance stuff, Dante/Petrarch/Boccaccio, Cervantes, Marguerite de Navarre, Ariosto and Torquato Tasso in Italy, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Corneille, Racine in France, Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca in Spain, Camoëns in Portugal, probably something in Germany too.
>>24682621>Was he right about Milton?Read Paradise found and then come back to me. You'll be too embarrassed to even ask such a question.
>>24682667Accent was different in the 17th century, retard-kun.
>>24682697Just listened to an audio recording of a 17th century guy talking. No it wasn't
>>24682684I got the same feeling from Paradise Lost desu
>>24682621>in both the lastkek angloes are delusional
>>24682684>Paradise found ?????
>>24682766I actually admire the English confidence when hailing national authors. It's respectable and structures their literature around central names, something which often lacks in foreign traditions
>>24682621Who? that barbarian who writes a tedious commentary in ten books of rumbling verse, on the first chapter of Genesis? that slovenly imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the creation, by making the Messiah take a pair of compasses from Heaven's armory to plan the world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole universe by his fiat? Can I think you have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso's Hell and the Devil; who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention of firearms, represents the devils and angels cannonading each other in Heaven? Neither I nor any other Italian can possibly take pleasure in such melancholy reveries; but the marriage of Sin and Death, and snakes issuing from the womb of the former, are enough to make any person sick that is not lost to all sense of delicacy. This obscene, whimsical, and disagreeable poem met with the neglect it deserved at its first publication; and I only treat the author now as he was treated in his own country by his contemporaries.
>>24682621>homer>loftiness of thought The guy who keeps going on about how large the rocks his characters were yeeting are?
>>24682697Not really but there was more flexibility because we used to be able take pedants out back and whip and pummel them into silence. That was back when Aristotle was still king of the philosophical ring.
>Nor second he, that rode sublime>Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy,>The secrets of th' Abyss to spy.>He pass'd the flaming bounds of Place and Time:>The living throne, the sapphire-blaze,>Where angels tremble, while they gaze,>He saw; but blasted with excess of light,>Clos'd his eyes in endless night.>Behold, where Dryden's less presumptuous car,>Wide o'er the fields of Glory bear>Two coursers of ethereal race,>With necks in thunder cloth'd, and long-resounding pace.
>>24683043>action badwoman moment
