That's pretty much how Dante was for me... 

Thanks, strina.  I better try to read it sometime.  Although artisitcally hell is much more interesting than hell, I must put in a word for Vaughan Williams' Pilgrims' Progress. The heavenly bits (the House Beautiful, the crossing to the Heavenly City, the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains,) are far more engaging for me than the hellish bits (Vanity Fair, Apollyon.)

But here is Satan in Paradise Lost:

Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.
Nine times the space that measures day and night
To mortal men, he, with his horrid crew,
Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf,
Confounded, though immortal

My tutor commented on Samuel Johson's criticism of PL that "the want of human interest is everywhere felt" that Satan provided the human interest.  And Blake, and lots of others, have considered that Satan is the real hero.  After all Milton was very, very happy to support the overthrow of traditional authority in the person of Charles I.

SusanDoris - I think listening to Milton's rolling periods on a recording sounds a good idea.  I will post some pre-modern poetry that I find more congenial if you like.

Nope, t-i-n.

Terry did me for one term on C20 lit.  I suspect both he and I disliked Viginia Woolf for different reasons.  If you really want to know http://www.mansfield.ox.ac.uk/study/people/creaser.aspx


Susan D - if you're still there you might like to bear in mind that Milton's reputation has yo-yoed like crazy.  For a long time he was up there with Shakespeare.  In the 40s he was put down by an unpleasant Cambridge English don called Frank Leavis.  I am not a great fan of Milton - no sensuality, no camp and very high minded Puritan.  But he didn't deserve Leavis' putdown.

You make old Queenie's husband sound like a vet, Don!

This is very difficult poem for me to understand, but I like it.

Sonnet 94
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Interesting to know what the various Mrs Miltons thought of all this.  I have not read Milton's arguments for divorce, but I believe his line was that it is very unfair for some wise and intelligent man to be stuck with some foolish girl that doesn't appreciate him.

I don't think we've met yet, but I'll entertain all guesses via PM...

Here's another Wendy Cope -

Clouds (from Ahead of My Time, poems for musical performance by Jason Strugnell)

Sprinkle the air around you
with short, quiet sounds

Make more and more raindrops
until your co-players

are drenched

Let the intervals between sounds
grow longer

When you have finished raining
hold still
Loom