MILTON IN THE CLASSROOM: SOME EXPERIENCES AND PERSPECTIVES: Teaching Milton to Undergraduates

As a teacher of Milton to both undergraduate and graduate students, I was surprised by Professor Gallagher's recent article1 in response to the MLA seminar on teaching Milton‐surprised not by the argument or its assumptions but rather by the nature of the problem itself. I find that it is a problem to teach Milton to undergraduates. It is not because they are unsympathetic to Milton's ideas or beliefs or because they find them to be irrelevant, but more obviously because of the difficulties posed by a poetry and a prose as sophisticated and complicated as Milton's. My students range from the evangelical to the incredulous (you mean someone really believed in a fall?); however, they do not seem to find Milton any more irrelevant than they find Camus or Hemingway. I found Professor Gallagher's response thoughtful and provocative, but it did not address the problems that I encounter.