Contributing to the celebration of Milton's 400th Birthday

Today is the actual anniversary of the day Milton was born, and Geoffrey Hill has been active in the events of the Milton Quatercentenary.  Geoffrey Hill's Lady Margaret Lecture, "Milton as Muse," (Christ's College Cambridge, October 29, 2008) is available on a podcast.  He insists that Milton influenced Wordsworth and that "Milton's major muse was the city."

Links

"John Milton 400th Anniversary Celebrations, The Lady Margaret Lectures 2008" Christ's College, Cambridge (2008).

"John Milton 400: Milton Quatercentenary," Cambridge (2008).

"John Milton, A Symposium to Commemorate the Quatercentenary of his Birth," British Academy (December 6, 2008).

David Gervais on Hill's "Late Flowering" in PN Review

A few tidbits from "The Late Flowering of Geoffrey Hill" by David Gervais in PN Review 183, 35.1 (September-October 2008):

"...what gives Hill's verse its name for 'difficulty' is less its abstruseness (things can after all be looked up) than its refusal to spell out the links in its chain."

"...Hill's verse is not 'difficult' because it is recondite but because it puts us on the spot as readers, that is, on the spot both morally and aesthetically."

"The hostile voices that disrupt the surface of Speech! Speech! are ultimately inseparable from its 'noble vernacular', woven into the fabric of the very poetry they threaten.  Nothing better shows why Hill is essentially a public poet than this obligation he feels to include such alien voices within his verse even when they run counter to its lyric inspiration."

Celebrating Milton

This year, for the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth (Milton Quatercentenary), Hill has an occasion to further reveal his Milton connection. He read poems by Milton and also from his own work at the Bodleian Library in Oxford (April 4, 2008). He will speak on "Milton as Muse" in the Lady Margaret Lecture Series (October 29, 2008), followed by Christopher Ricks, "Milton and 'the best criticism of any work'" on November 26. (Earlier lectures from the same series by Quentin Skinner, Colin Burrow, and Sharon Achinstein are already available on-line as podcasts.) On December 6, he will be reading from his poetry during a day-long Symposium devoted to Milton at the British Academy.

Link:

http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/milton400/lectures.htm

Hallgrimur Petursson?

This fellow comes up repeatedly in Scenes from Comus (2005).  In section 69 (p.49)  the first time he is mentioned, without a first name, a fruitless search revealed a Tom Petersson, the Illinois-born bassist for the rock band Cheap Trick, or possibly a German mathemetician named Petursson, who complied with the Nazis... but no, Hallgrimur Petursson (the first name occurs, finally, in Part III, section 5, p.59) is neither of those identities..., but a "17th Century Lutheran poet, hymnwriter, priest/pastor from Iceland" to quote spurgeon.wordpress.com...

Links:

The Shepherd's Scrapbook

http://spurgeon.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/hallgrimur-petursson

The Bibliothecary

http://www.omnigatherum.com/Bibliarch0418.html