Milton’s Timeless Music

Most of us in the twenty-first century are assailed by information to a degree that could not have been predicted twenty-five years ago, and that comes at the price of an attenuated ability to respond to pure form. Music, the least representational of the arts, is the closest to pure form. And to the extent that poetry is itself a music, the aesthetic experience it offers makes recovery at least as pleasurable as discovery, just as a long-form musical composition may sound better if we have already heard it. Readers of Milton, supplying their own examples, can recall numerous passages whose music continues to give pleasure. This article provides one reader’s experience of Milton’s poetry, with different passages exerting their particular appeal in youth, middle age, and old age.