Digital Milton

Terrance Lindall has sent me the following concerning a new book, Digital Milton:

I am pleased to be in the book Digital Milton, which, according to Palgrave..."is the first volume to investigate John Milton in terms of our digital present. It explores the digital environments Milton now inhabits as well as the diverse digital methods that inform how we read, teach, edit, and analyze his works. Some chapters use innovative techniques, such as processing metadata from vast archives of early modern prose, coding Milton’s geographical references on maps, and visualizing debt networks from literature and from life. Other chapters discuss the technologies and platforms shaping how literature reaches us today, from audiobooks to eReaders, from the OED Online to Wikipedia, and from Twitter to YouTube. Digital Milton is the first say on a topic that will become ever more important to scholars, students, and teachers of early modern literature in the years to come."

[Please click HERE to view the book's contents]

I have been digitalizing Milton through the internet for years with videos and on-line magazines, so I am pleased with the recognition that the outstanding Shakespeare and Milton scholar Professor Hugh Macrae Richmond has afforded me in documenting my achievements in past years to promote the Greatest poem in the English language.

In my essay from 2001 "The Epistemological Movement if late 20th Century Art" [please click HERE] I have talked about the digital and although I do not mention Milton, my thoughts actually relate to Milton himself as a poet: 

"It [poetry] is the practicing of the redirection of the energies that form perceptions. But it is not a creative process. It has been determined from the first instant of time in the unfolding of the Historical Will of the mind of God of which we are merely an extension or "aspect." It is an infinite  expansion of potentiality and actuality [Aristotle's Metaphysics]. GOD (WILL), a point of nothingness from which all comes, hovers over the realms of possibility, and on the tabula rasa of our universe imposes order on the ideas (perceptions) generated by the action of possibility becoming actuality. Ultimately we cannot break out of the dualistic world by which we define all things. Quine, up at Harvard, attempted to invent a new logic circumventing the paradoxes inherent in non-contradiction. Mixed results. And since computer thinking is based upon the binary, the computer probably cannot transcend it’s own makeup. In that sense, the whole is no more than the sum of it’s parts. And fractal geometry suggests the same." I now think that with quantum computing this transcendence might be possible.

Undoubtedly it is heresy to say that Milton's poetry is not a creative act. But Milton himself might not deem me incorrect. After all, did he not have a guide in his "HEAVENLY MUSE?" And, did not Dante have a guide in Virgil? Even Plato in his theory of forms said everything in our world is a reflection of perfect ideas. Undoubtedly I am, as quoted in the Digital Milton book, "...radical and nonconformist." I am not writing and painting to be accepted in our time, but to examine issues in my own way...inspired by my own muse! Unfortunately, progressive thinkers who esteem "tolerance and inclusiveness" on Milton Lists could not tolerate my ideas

                                                                  - Terrance Lindall

This sounds interesting.

Milton receiving the gift of poetry from God, Terrance Lindall