Is Milton a better poet than Shakespeare?

Can someone explain how Milton is good?

Especially in blank verse, anyone can write hundreds of pages of the cramped, unmelodic stuff that fills Paradise Lost. Even just outside of the poetic form itself, there's nothing remarkable nor even interesting in the narrative of P.L.

I don't get it.

Who cares mate

>>8795602
t. pleb

>>8795577
No.

>>8795602
Milton is more influential than good tbqh

He's like the Plato or Cicero of English literature. With his towering influence, all English poetry since has been in some sort of reaction to his work.

>>8795602
>blank verse

Shakespeare too wrote in blank verse (mostly), hence the comparison in OP.

>>8795603
Milton was seen as better than Shakespeare, back in the day. Now their status are reversed and Milton is #2. Just why?

>>8795624
>all English poetry since has been in some sort of reaction to his work

How so? And couldn't you say the same thing for Shakespeare?

>>8795577
Maybe, but only because he was such a tryhard.

>>8795628
>Shakespeare too wrote in blank verse (mostly)

But Shakespeare's lines aren't cabined and cramped. They're less restricted by the form and more expressive (wider array of words used).

Milton isn't wowing; a child can count syllables.

>>8795602
Epic poems almost have to be blank, otherwise you'd get annoyed real quick. Imagine a song that plays for hours

>>8795641
I'm not knocking it for being in blank verse. I'm saying, especially because it's blank verse, I don't see how it's such a wowing feat.

Meaning something like: a play is far easier to write than a novel, but Hamlet exhibits more talent and genius than, like, a Stephen King book. It's not that the form is necessarily easy mode; it's that the mode lends itself toward being easy.

>>8795640
Milton's verse isn't cramped, what the hell are you talking about.

>less restricted by the form
How so?

>more expressive
Debatable.

And you don't see anything interesting in the narrative of PL precisely because it has been so influential that you don't see the novelty. The poem itself says it will tell "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme" (or something like that, quoting from memory). Did you just read the poem or actually studied it?

>>8795649
>play easier to write than a novel
How so?

>>8795649

>play is far easier to write than a novel

a hackjob play, maybe. I would put the highest achievements of drama well above the highest in long-form prose fiction. It is a very difficult thing to sculpt the inexplicable out of the slaves between what characters say, and have that be understood by the reader or the audience member, than it is to simply indicate that there is such a thing. It's impact is greater, too, felt deeper in the body. At least for me.

>>8795666

slaves=spaces

Thanks, Santana.

>>8795653
for one thing plays are lighter to carry around, ill be fucked if im going to read a 1000 page story about aristocrats having tea in 19th century russia or some shit - its like carrying a house brick in your bag

>>8795602
>there's nothing remarkable nor even interesting in the narrative of P.L.
terrible opinion. how can you not be intrigued by Satan's rousing oration, his journey through the chaotic void, his battle with the Heavenly Hosts, and his punishment? A much greater apocryphal tale than Dante's if you ask me.

fantastic commentary on the natures of man and woman, chastity, original sin, redemption, etc. plus it ascribes so much depth of character to personages hardly mentioned in the Bible. Milton's Satan, Adam, Eve, and Jesus are all fantastic characters worthy of study.

Even the historical aspect: the questions about the ordering of a polity, the tension between Catholicism and Protestantism, the debate over geocentrism, recognizing other cultures myths of the deluge... the list goes on.

If you read Paradise Lost as a windbag's Genesis, you missed out.

>>8795684
That's a very stupid reason.

>>8795641
It didn't disturb Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Pushkin, Hugo, Camões, Aubigné... who all wrote rhyming epics in other languages.

>>8795736
>inb4 "it's different in English"

Byron's Don Juan.

>>8795577
No.

>>8795602
Paradise Lost, cramped?? It's the most liberated blank verse in the English language. Pay attention to Milton's revolutionary use of enjambment balanced by the variation of the caesura.

>there's nothing remarkable nor even interesting in the narrative of P.L
Nothing interesting in its concern with lying and rhetoric, with political allegory, free will and determinism, the relationship between men and women?

>>8795649
Sorry, this is simply wrong. Have you tried writing by rhymed and blank verse? Every poet, and I mean every poet I know considers the latter far, far harder, because rhyme offers a crutch to the poet by creating a simple, pleasant music and propelling the poem forward of its own accord. It's exceptionally, exceptionally difficult to write readable blank verse in the way that Shakespeare, Milton and Coleridge manage to do without becoming monotonous.

>>8795736
And Spenser in English. And Pope's translation of the Iliad.

'There's nothing interesting in Milton'

Jesus H. Christ, I mean its no 'Spirited Away,' but Paradise Lost is kinda a fun story desu :)xx