Milton Understood the Exile Better Than He Knew

Milton Understood the Exile Better Than He Knew

London, 1667I have spent the past three days reading a poem called Paradise Lost, published this year by a man named John Milton. He is blind. He dictated it to his daughters. It is ten thousand lines of blank verse about the fall of Satan, the temptation of Adam and...
A Mind Still Building What It Came to Build

A Mind Still Building What It Came to Build

Weimar, autumn 1799I was introduced to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at a gathering at the Duchess Anna Amalia’s court. He is fifty years old and the most celebrated writer in the German language and the weight of that does not appear to have flattened him the way...