Tag: John Milton
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William Wordsworth: “The blind poet”?
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, on April 7, 1770. He was the totemic father of the Lakeland poets, who extolled the relation between man and the natural world: a wedding between nature and the human mind that to him symbolized the mind of God. A prolific writer…
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“Troubled in my eyes”: the risks of reading and writing
Katherine Harvey London, England, United Kingdom A medieval miniature showing St Mark reading a book and holding spectacles to his eyes. From Jean Poyer, The Tilliot Hours (c. 1500), The British Library. On January 1, 1660, a young Londoner named Samuel Pepys began to keep a diary. Over the next nine and a half…
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An abominable habit
Michael Crossland London, United Kingdom Onania, by John Marten. 1730. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (accessed April 4, 2019). Link Jay is a large man in his twenties with a plume of unruly red hair, giving him the air of an oversized rooster. He is a great storyteller with a contagious laugh, and I always…