I borrowed this from the library mainly for the cover and title

Sorry I am such a low-quality contributor on this forum.

That is a pretty great cover, despite the sideways text. Is it nonfiction?

It is, yes.

Composed after the collapse of his political hopes, Milton's great poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are an effort to understand what it means to be a poet on the threshold of a post-theological world. The argument of Delirious Milton, inspired in part by the architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, is that Milton's creative power is drawn from a rift at the center of his consciousness over the question of creation itself. This rift forces the poet to oscillate deliriously between two incompatible perspectives, at once affirming and denying the presence of spirit in what he creates. From one perspective the act of creation is centered in God and the purpose of art is to imitate and praise the Creator. From the other perspective the act of creation is centered in the human, in the built environment of the modern world. The oscillation itself, continually affirming and negating the presence of spirit, of a force beyond the human, is what Gordon Teskey means by delirium. He concludes that the modern artist, far from being characterized by what Benjamin (after Baudelaire) called "loss of the aura," is invested, as never before, with a shamanistic spiritual power that is mediated through art.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/TESDEL.html

Blurbs:

Gordon Teskey begins his meditation by observing that, in contrast to Spenser, Milton is a poet of the 'origin'; that is, he 'strives to understand things by going back to their beginnings.' What Milton finds when he goes back is the act of divine creation, the consciousness of which enters into a complex and even vertiginous relationship with the creation the poet himself is now attempting. Out of 'the rapid alternation between those two,' between 'obedience to the existence of the other and resolution to produce,' Milton, says Teskey, produces a poetry of delirium. It is the achievement of Teskey's book to match that delirium--that sense of the unconfinable and our struggles to confine it--with his own.
--Stanley Fish, author of How Milton Works
This is the most important study of Milton to be written in many years. Teskey has a rare gift for combining rigorous argument with an unusually broad sense of literary history. He thinks afresh about Milton--no mean achievement--and at the same time provides us with a new way of understanding the conditions under which Milton could be a poet of such cosmic range.
--Angus Fletcher, author of A New Theory for American Poetry
A brooding, brilliant, fantastically ambitious book in which Gordon Teskey undertakes to write a history of modernity through an analysis of creation in Milton. For Teskey, Milton was not only the greatest epic poet since Homer but also the philosophical revolutionary who marked the decisive break between divine will and human will. Before Milton, poets derived their authority from the cosmos that God had created; after Milton, they claimed the power of creation for themselves. At once risk-taking and deeply learned, Delirious Milton is a crucial text for anyone who wishes to understand the central claims of modern art.
--Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World

Hrm.

that sounds fascianting, what was the assumption that it was a post thelogical world?

(Apologies, but now that I've read the preface and skimmed it a bit more closely, no, this is not for me at all. Maybe I was misled by the fact that the writing is not obviously opaque and jargon-laden. I should just be reading philosophy or social sciences or something. The games literary critics play somehow repulse me.)

tell me more

I don't know, I just find the whole "God is dead, strong poets and artists are now Creators--just like him!" a little excessive. I don't believe in God, but get over yourselves already, writing Paradise Lost is not a whole lot like creating the cosmos. Also I hope he is going to explain how closely he thinks the whole shaman analogy fits. At any rate, I'm not going to read it. Oh yeah, also artists channeling spirit (I think that was the phrase--may have been a different verb), without any real explanation of what spirit means here (maybe it comes later). Reminds me too much of Robert Duncan's slant on poetics, which used to fascinate me, but ultimately proved really alien to my spirit.

(Feel free to delete this too, since it seems to have arrived an unintended trolling.)

Fullfilling a request is not trolling, imo.

do you have a reaction to romanticism in general (or in any particular representatives), rockist? i ask just because it would seem to me to generally traffic pretty heavily in that kind of line, or variations on it. so that it's not as if the general arrangement of ideas in this book is, like, unheard of or thus offputting because of its excessive attempt at novelty.

Fullfilling a request is not trolling, imo.

Well no, but it's just that a lot of you here are very passionate about poetry and literary criticism and critical theory, so busting in and saying, "This stuff [especially the latter two things listed there] just annoys me," is a little troll-like. Except it really didn't start out innocently enough with "this looks pretty interesting."

do you have a reaction to romanticism in general (or in any particular representatives), rockist?

I'm not sure. I haven't really thought about it much lately. Maybe some varieties of romanticism do this to me, or at least some varieties of romantic theory (not necessarily the artifacts that result).

i ask just because it would seem to me to generally traffic pretty heavily in that kind of line, or variations on it. so that it's not as if the general arrangement of ideas in this book is, like, unheard of or thus offputting because of its excessive attempt at novelty.

You're right, it's not really unusual. It's just not the sort of thing I usually read these days. Also, after a quick read of a couple chapters, I am a little surprised at how the author is (judging from the blurbs cited above) apparently getting away with being so slippery about some ideas that seem to me to need clarifying. But then again, since I haven't read the whole thing, I don't know what he does later.