Historian Gordon Campbell, author of The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome, recently lectured on the poem “Il Pensamento” by British poet John Milton, specifically its reference to hermits. Campbell selected the last twenty lines of the poem, the title of which means “The Serious One,” or “The Pensive One.”
The poem represents a transition from Milton’s early Catholic thinking to his conversion to Anglicanism to his radicalization as Puritan — and back again to a Catholic or Anglican sympathy. The latter thinking was for Milton more compatible with his affinity to Melancholy, a popular eighteenth-century attitude among intellectuals and poets, which nostalgia further welcomed the historical hermit. Indeed, in his book, Campbell describes Milton’s poem as “the founding text of the eighteenth-century cult of melancholy.” The cultivation of melancholy conjured a romantic landscape of hermits, though it did not directly advocate eremitism.
URL: https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/public-lectures/summer-2021/milton-hermit/
