Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership 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.
