It will not be the last time that I stumble upon a work and wonder why I have not read it before. I am reading Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets, specifically the chapter on John Milton.
It is not my first encounter with Johnson. I have read The History of Rasselas and some of his essays on Shakespeare’s plays. Samuel Beckett read Johnson intensely, “at times even obsessively, especially in the years 1937-40.”* Following the traces of books that my favourite writers ardently reread is a preoccupation.
Johnson’s Milton is no mere critical exercise; it is a vivid journey through his intellectual life, written in a rich and sonorous prose that I frequently copy into my notebook, hoping against hope that his natural beauty of thought somehow flows through me. Each line resonates and invites me to pause and wonder. I plan to spend the rest of this year with this captivating book.
Johnson quotes Milton: “By labour and intense study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.”
This year’s rediscovery of the very great pleasures of reading Shakespeare’s plays and my reading of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets will undoubtedly, with diversions, form the spine of next year’s reading.
*Samuel Beckett’s Library by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon