When Milton met Galileo

Earlier this year, in a class on Victorian poetry, the professor played a couple of wax cylinder recordings of Alfred Tennyson reading some of his most famous poems like "The Charge of the Light Brigade." The recordings were taken by Thomas Edison. I always find it hard to fathom whenever I read of two geniuses like Edison and Tennyson getting together. What do they talk about? It's rather like the comic book crossovers they would have when I was a kid where Batman and Superman would team up to fight crime.

In the New Yorker, Jonathan Rosen discusses the enduring relevance of John Milton and Paradise Lost. Most interestingly, he discusses a 1638 meeting between Milton and the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. The meeting clearly had an impact on Milton since, in Paradise Lost, Satan’s shield looks like the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope. Pretty cool... almost as cool as Batman and Superman teaming up...