Young Milton`s L`Allegro and Il Penseroso: Poems of the weary age

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As Milton’s early poetry, "L’Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" explicitly reveal a poet’s process of seeking and demonstrating his own poetic possibility. In that process, we find that the poetic speakers of "L’Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" are hovering with the uneasiness underlying their poetic visions. It is presented and exposed in the complicated and somewhat experimental texture—or form and content—of these twin poems. I will show what happens among the dichotomous forms, conflicting speakers, diverse imagery, and uneasy tone, and then I will try to prescribe the textual experience in the act of reading as a product of interpretation.

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It is a matter of general agreement that these two poems should be considered together in the critical analysis and assessment. However, they are conspicuously contrasting in their underlying structures. Stanley Fish defines "L’Allegro" as a triumph of absence of mind. He insists that it is Milton’s wish to liberate us from the care of consecutive sequence in "L’Allegro". The sequence is so arranged as to discourage us from extrapolating from it a composite scene, the details of which would then be interpretable. The reader is delighted and relaxed because the care of consecutive mind is absent. But, according to Stanley Fish, the experience of reading "Il Penseroso" is unfold stage by stage, so that we are continually revising our understanding of what we have just read.

참고 자료

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1980.
Revard, Stella P. "`L’Allegro` and `Il Penseroso`: Classical Tradition
and Renaissance Mythography". PMLA 101 (1986): 342-4.
Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance.
London: RKP, 1984.