Posts Tagged ‘Justifying ways of God to man’
Abigail Deutsch
And how should I begin?
In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton paints and points and dallies, filling eight lines with sorrow and hope and mountains and fruit, disobeying the strictures of English grammar in favor of the more contorted Latinate, including, even, an “or” in line seven that threatens to undermine his progress, such as it is, until, in the beginning of line nine, he finally delivers the phrase “In the beginning”—the first words of Genesis—and then the sentence continues for several more lines, such that “In the beginning” serves as a sort of hinge, swinging the reader backward into the book’s preliminary lines or forward, if he will, into what follows, itself functioning as a sort of “or,” an opener of possibilities, a poser of questions.
It’s not over yet.
As if in tardy celebration of Milton’s 400th birthday (which, you’ll remember from all the parties, was last year), scholars and graphic novelists and rightist revisionists have been reworking the Bible. Certain conservatives are seeking to reform and void the King James version, which they view as troublingly liberal, while a Dutch scholar investigates Genesis’s first verb. R. Crumb’s Genesis is forthcoming, as is David Rosenberg’s Literary Bible. You’re doubtless wondering, as I am: will any of these make the Good Book an even Better Book?
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RECENT COMMENTS
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But in ye olden ShakespeHearean days, the King NEEDED the Fool. & the Fool ... MORE »
Henry Gould | 03.17.10 -
Sina, one of the things I like about poetry is that no one wants to ... MORE »
Mark Wallace | 03.17.10 -
I work in insurance. There's a lot to be said for having more time ... MORE »
Marty Elwell | 03.17.10 -
Michael Gottlieb's "Jobs of the Poets" seems relevant here. It's a great essay---
http://jacketmagazine.com/35/gottlieb-jobs.shtml
DB MORE »
David Buuck | 03.17.10 -
I agree, this sounds wonderful! MORE »
adam strauss | 03.17.10
To Sonnet, to Son-net, Tuscon Net (54)
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
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