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In this conversation, Achsah Guibbory joins Jack and Milo to discuss John Donne, John Milton, love, sex, sin, marriage, desire, Paradise Lost, and the problem of whether erotic love can ever be holy.
Donne and Milton are two of the great Johns of seventeenth-century English poetry, claimed by some to be entirely different men. Donne is witty, erotic, devotional, cynical, sacred, obscene, metaphysical, and impossible to pin down. Milton is austere, sublime, political, theological, revolutionary, authoritarian, and not much fun at a party. Yet both poets return, in radically different ways, to the same infinity: love.
The discussion begins with the word itself. What did “love” mean in the seventeenth century, before Darwin, before Freud, and before modern romantic individualism? How did English poetry inherit older distinctions between erotic love, spiritual love, charity, friendship, desire, marriage, and the love of God? And why does one little English monosyllable have to carry so much metaphysical weight?
Guibbory places Donne and Milton against the long Christian tradition that associated sex with sin, chastity with holiness, and desire with the Fall. Augustine looms large: original sin, shame, bodily rebellion, and the problem of sexual desire after Eden. But Donne, in poems such as *The Good-Morrow*, *The Ecstasy*, *The Canonization*, *The Sun Rising*, and *A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning*, offers something stranger and more daring: the possibility that bodily love might itself become spiritual.
The conversation then turns to Milton’s *Paradise Lost*. What is sex like before the Fall? Do Adam and Eve desire one another in Eden, or is their prelapsarian love something more equal, mutual, peaceful, and almost desireless? What changes after the fruit is eaten? Why does Milton describe postlapsarian sex as the “seal of guilt”? And why does Adam fall so quickly once Eve has fallen?
Along the way we discuss Milton’s bower scene, Eve’s reflection in the lake, Adam’s loneliness, Satan’s resentment, hierarchy, equality, the strange ending of *Paradise Regained*, and whether Milton gives Satan some of his own political instincts. We also talk about Donne’s contradictions, Milton’s unresolved tensions, Thomas Browne, Kafka's weird humour, and why great writers are often most alive when they have not fully solved themselves.
Expect reflections on:
John Donne and John Milton as rival poets of love
Achsah Guibbory on Donne, Milton, sex, and theology
Augustine, original sin, chastity, and sexual shame
Erotic love, spiritual love, charity, and marriage
Donne’s love poetry and the holiness of consummated desire
Milton’s *Paradise Lost* and sex before the Fall
Adam, Eve, equality, hierarchy, and the bower scene
Desire as lack, danger, or spiritual possibility
Satan, resentment, monarchy, and Milton’s politics
The difference between Donne’s lyric contradictions and Milton’s epic resolutions
The “seal of guilt” and sex after the Fall
Milton’s divorce tracts and the nightmare of “household captivity”
Paradise, the New Jerusalem, and whether we really want a world without desire
If you enjoy long-form conversations on poetry, literature, theology, philosophy, seventeenth-century writing, erotic love, sin, Milton, Donne, and the strange borderlands between body and soul, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment below.
Who writes love better: John Donne or John Milton? And can erotic love ever be holy?
Chapters:
00:00:00 Sex, sin, and Donne’s dangerous poetry
00:01:16 Introduction
00:06:32 Achsah Guibbory appears
00:11:06 Milton’s youthful love poem
00:16:02 Donne versus Milton
00:20:23 What does “love” mean?
00:27:03 Augustine’s sexual legacy
00:29:02 Donne’s sacred eroticism
00:31:17 Plato, Genesis, and desire
00:35:14 Sex before the Fall
00:44:33 Desire, lack, and Satan
00:49:41 Milton’s unresolved epic
00:52:41 Donne’s contradictions
00:56:30 Paradise Regained and grace
01:01:16 Adam’s desire
01:12:20 Eve and Adam fall
01:14:16 Sex after the Fall
01:22:52 The Messiah's Daughter
01:33:23 Marriage, divorce, and captivity
Correction:
2:00 It is, in fact, Barnard.
