Nicolson, Marjorie Hope

Marjorie Hope Nicolson - one of the world's foremost authorities on Milton - examines Milton's work beginning with the juvenalia, the famous Minor Poems, "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Comus" (and "Arcades"), and "Lycidas." She explores Milton's middle years, when he was diverted from poetry to become Latin Secretary under Oliver Cromwell. Examining the sonnets he composed during this time, she also scrutinizes the many prose-pamphlets and tracts that Milton said he "wrote with his left hand." Finally, Nicolson looks at the great poems, including a book-by-book analysis of Paradise Lost and a careful reading of Samson Agonistes, Milton's poetic "closet drama."

The authors of this book present a medical case history of the poet Alexander Pope (who suffered from many diseases throughout his life besides his well known dwarfism and hunchback). Drawing heavily upon the Correspondence for information about Pope's symptoms, they discuss his various ailments and the effect ill health had on his writing. In addition, the authors discuss the influence of his interest in astronomy science on Pope's poetic imagination as well as his interest in microscopy, geology and the building of a grotto, and physics.

To English poets and writers of the seventeenth century, as to their predecessors, mountains were ugly protuberances which disfigured nature and threatened the symmetry of earth; they were symbols of God's wrath. Yet, less than two centuries later the romantic poets sang in praise of mountain splendor, of glorious heights that stirred their souls to divine ecstasy. In this very readable and fascinating study, Marjorie Hope Nicolson considers the intellectual renaissance at the close of the seventeenth century that caused the shift from mountain gloom to mountain glory. She examines various writers from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and traces both the causes and the process of this drastic change in perception.

Profiles of nine acclaimed musicians, including Paganini, Liszt, Paderewski, Casals, and Gould, attempt to explain each artist's popularity.