The Birth of the Cool

I once asked Professor Donald Kennedy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill if there was any satire in Malory. He thought not. (Thoughtfully; quizzically.) For the last forty years I have thought of Milton generally along the lines of Ezra Pound: "Dante's god is an ineffable divinity; Milton's god is a fussy old man with a hobby." This probably began in a leafy green upstate New York college where, second semester of my senior year, my friend Louis V. and I were asked to leave Professor Orwen's Milton class due to excessive disruptive giggling in the back of the classroom (the tower at Wads Aud). Grade for class: F. The vogue by which we are washed over just now, elucidating Milton's prescience and hipness, naturally enough, intimidates me, and I should seek out as might in the 19th century West, a scout for annoyed Native People, the bit of a moment in his work when he peeked into our times and saw the difference between those who believed resolutely in the inviolability of the present tense, and those who drifted freely, and quite merrily, as rudderless sailboats, with

in the galley,
the morning aromas on the water,
of coffee, eggs, and bacon.