Lecture 12 | Leaving Paradise & the Elegiac Movement (Book XII) | Paradise Lost in Slow Motion

Following the idea of Paradise Lost as an elegy, I want us to think of the elegy as a form that can enact this psychological movement from loss to recompense. The poetry of Book 12 encloses these key moments of (what I call) "elegiac transit" and trace the psychological movement from loss to consolation. In this lecture, I argue that the elegiac movement is not so much an exchange of states in that one thing is traded for another. It rather involves a dilation, in which the former state is not so much lost but transmuted and the scope of recompense enlarges to enclose it.

[@daveg4036]

When the notification comes up from Adam, it’s time to settle down with some headphones and a cup of tea. Perfect Friday 😊

[@closereadingpoetry]

Ah, my ideal viewer! Thanks, and I hope you enjoy!

[@edwardrood3556]

Thank you very much for this lecture series.
I just finished reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. He proposed that each Christian culture broadly adapts the basic symbols of the faith to its own understanding of the world. I think Paradise Lost serves this function for the West (i.e., cultures that stemmed from Latin Christendom.) Spengler even called these cultures “Faustian” because of their troubled fascination with the Devil. (Doctor Faust was the German scholar who sold his soul to the Devil for forbidden wisdom.) If Spengler was right, it makes sense for the Devil to be the poem’s hero. From a certain point of view, he is a champion of the intellect trying to lay hold of godhood in defiance of God’s law, and bidding others to join him in the transgression.
Spengler believed he foresaw a “second religiousness” coming once reason had exhausted itself, in which people would fall back on old beliefs, for instance by taking solace in dead rituals or rallying around a decrepit, increasingly dogmatic science as the standard-bearer for absolute truth. I hope instead that the that Holy Spirit brings the ancient word of Scripture to life in Christians so that it’s seen not as a set of arbitrary rules to be overthrown, as the Devil sees it, or as merely a treasure to cherish for its own sake, as some sentimentalists think of it, but as a living means to know ourselves and God, and in the end, by grace, to be made holy.

[@closereadingpoetry]

Very interesting. Thanks for these thoughts. I'm not familiar with Spengler, but how he describes "second religiousness" sounds like what already happened in Victorian England with the Oxford Movement and the crisis of faith and science.

[@alexfang3401]

so beautiful, so nice

[@juliasampaio3364]

It was the best!!! I miss it already

[@closereadingpoetry]

Same. Such a great experience!