Talk:John Milton
From Academic Kids
An event in this article is a April 27 selected anniversary (may be in HTML commment)
| Contents |
Copyrights sale
Surely it's bollocks to say that Milton sold a copyright for £10 in 1667, when copyright did not even exist until 1709?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
Also, £10 in 1667 had approximately the same purchasing power as £1000 today.
(see http://eh.net/hmit/ppowerbp/?action=before70£s=10&shillings=&pence=&year=1667)
- According to this page (http://www.uwm.edu/Library/special/exhibits/clastext/clspg117.htm) Milton sold the publishing rights to Paradise Lost for an initial payment of £5 and £5 for each of three impressions as they were completed. ErikD 22:34, 2004 Jul 6 (UTC)
- This being the case, why does the anachronistic and just plain wrong reference to
copyright persist in this article?
Blind? How?
"His incessant labours cost him his eyesight"
Not specific enough. How did he lose his eyesight? 4.65.244.206 21:34, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Diction
Some of the diction and prose in this article is out of character with Wikipedia and not particularly helpful. "Hewing to the old faith" may be a nice turn of phrase but not helpful to readers who don't know that you're trying to say he was Catholic. And "Milton père"? That's not even English! There's no need to show off, just say "Milton's father." Remember we're trying to put together a general audience encyclopedia here. Tue Apr 27 15:50:13 UTC 2004
Comments
This article seems to have been taken from an older source.
It writes: "His point of view is entirely subjective and individualistic; his faith is deduced from Scripture by the inner illumination of the Spirit"
Well, is it based on scripture, or is in entirely individualistic? And how could one know whether Milton's innards had been illuminated at the time of his writing? Moreover, it's just odd to claim such individualism for Milton, since he's part of a tradition of Puritan dissent--cf. the Levellers, etc., and the works of Christopher Hill. Milton was part of a broad puritan movement.
A general purpose article om Milton should also provide a bit more context about the times--this article assumes the reader knows about the English Civil war and its consequences, when this kind of thing should at least be touched on for those readers not up on the history of seventeenth-century England.
I suspect that the claim that Milton sold the copywright of his works is however correct. If the wiki article on copywright says that one couldn't sell or claim the right to publish things in England pre-1700, it is mistaken.
Source Missing
This source appeared in early versions of this page. Why is it not listed anymore?
"Text from Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religion, 1911"
--SSherris 15:50, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
