Poetry New York

One small room is surprisingly modest for a John Milton exhibition.  His legacy and influence on our contemporary literature and thought might demand a grandeur one would think the New York Public Library is arrogant enough to muster.  But tucked into a 15’x 30’ room next to a gift shop that proffers no miniature Milton busts are half a dozen glass cases containing first editions, engravings, portraits, and explanatory placards.  The show is called “John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life,” but it only hints at the man’s real history.  If anything, the show suffers from being too concise.  The shows being called the first exhibition in decades of John Milton’s work in New York City, and boasts “artifacts” never-before-seen by the public, (Alexander Pope’s autographed copy of poems, William Blake’s copy of Milton: A Poem in Two Books, one of four in existance).  With the show nearing its end, it seems that the initial academic fanfare has died down and Milton’s status as a mere “monument to dead ideas” has again been reared in the minds of people who happen accidentally into the exhibition and view it as nothing more than a curiosity from the 17th Century.  A series of very erudite lectures accompanied the show, showing maybe that only the academia is interested enough to exhume him for every centennial celebration, dressing up his corpses’ likeness and moldy manuscripts in glass sepulchres.  Even the weird and weak internal twinge of delight at seeing first editions of Comus in their alarmed cases is nothing compared to actually reading even a Modern Library or Dover edition of the masque.