The argument

The idea for this blog sprung from my head a few days ago, and I type it into existence with my  digital word less than a week before Milton's four-hundredth birthday. If I uphold my original plan, every entry here will relate to Milton in some way. Sadly, my lack of talent (to say nothing of the cold, damp climate I inhabit) prevents me from taking up my friend's suggestion that I model this blog on Geoffrey Chaucer's by writing in Milton's voice. What readership I find will have to be content with musings about Milton's writings; Milton jokes and crudely photoshopped images; and attempts to think through contemporary events through a Miltonic lens. If all else fails, I'll become the Perez Hilton of the Milton community, airing as much tawdry Miltonist gossip as I can find.

To the obvious question of why, I give first a personal answer. This blog is my way of publicly admitting that my mind has taken a deep, perhaps indelible impression from Milton's writings. Faced with new knowledge, I frequently find myself appealing not only to the encyclopedic scope of Milton's thought, but also to the structure of questions and questioning that it provides. Call this blog, then, the confessions of a young Miltonist.

This self-serving project does, however, have some slightly bigger aims. Milton studies currently seems gripped by the rather peculiar fear of proving the author relevant, of rescuing him from an obsolescence that may or may not loom ominously. To the question of why Milton matters, I have no real answer--aside from the obvious: that literary history matters; that history matters; that the intersection of artistic, literary, and political history matters; that Milton certainly mattered to others who might still matter, including Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Thomas Jefferson, Phyllis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, William Empson, C. S. Lewis, Peter Ackroyd, Philip Pullman, and any number of death metal bands who seem to think "Paradise Lost" is a nifty title--except to say that Milton matters to me. If I can explain why this is so in the unrarified, cacophonous hubbub of cyberspace, then perhaps I'll have made my small contribution to the task of saving Milton from pretend oblivion.

And, finally, I do want this blog to be a place for giving voice to embryonic ideas, glimmers, suspicions, and hunches without too much fear of error or lack of rigor. The title of this blog is my attempt to yoke Miltonic thought with a decidedly unmiltonic air of sprezzatura. Like all sprezzatura, of course, mine will be artificial, papering over my deep-seated fear of being mistaken or misunderstood. Still, I'll post quirky, half-baked ideas (and maybe even some of the idiosyncratic insights I've been hoarding desperately as my own) as often as my fortitude allows.