Milton

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

How does a poet make a poem? How does God make a world? How do we make a choice? John Milton’s great epic, Paradise Lost, is centrally concerned with these three kinds of making – poiesis, creation, and decision – and the relationships between them. To understand what kind of a maker Milton is, we will read his epic alongside his other writings and compare his accounts of making to those of Christian and classical predecessors as well as early modern contemporaries. Students should come ready to try their own hand at making arguments, poems, choices, and imagined worlds.