Launching the Canon Club

Come along and learn about Milton’s Paradise Lost

A few months ago I wrote about my desire for a club where people go to learn about the great writers, musicians, artists and poets of western civilisation. A Canon Club. 

I suggested:

That is why I’m proposing an idea, for a sort of club where people come and listen to talks about a particular feature of the western canon — Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Van Eyck, whatever — and fill in all these enormous holes in our knowledge. It would be a bit like an old-fashioned salon, or a Lyceum club. Although there are local salons still running, this would ideally be national. This canon club — I’m open to suggestions for a different name — would initially start in one city, presumably London, but if there was further interest we could help set up branches across Britain (and then even maybe abroad). Each local club would run semi-independently, but the wider organisation would help with arranging speakers and so on. 

It might be useful for authors wanting to sell books, but the club could also hire enthusiastic amateurs to just spread their knowledge for the sheer sake of it. Maybe there won’t be any interest in the events, but maybe there will — and I think there is a tendency to underestimate the public’s enthusiasm for culture.

Well, it’s finally happening, next month, with a talk by Jaspreet Singh Boparai on John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dr Johnson’s ‘Life of Milton’.

Boparai, as the blurb says, ‘trained as a classicist and historian of art, and specialises in the culture of Renaissance Italy, and the influence of ancient Roman sculpture and classical Greek poetry on artists and writers in fifteenth-century Florence. He studied Classics so that he wouldn't need footnotes to understand the Latin and Greek references in Paradise Lost. His doctorate focussed on the work of the Renaissance polymath Politian (1454-1494), who was a hero both to John Milton and Dr Samuel Johnson. He is one of the founders of the Antigone Journal, a new and open forum for Classics in the twenty-first century.’

It should be a very engaging talk. I have to admit that, like the middlebrow ignoramus that I am, my knowledge of Milton is very limited – something which shames me - and I hugely enjoyed Boparai’s recent article about the man and his epic poem.

He wrote:

Paradise Lost, the English national epic and the greatest poem in our language, was first published in 1667. And yet it seems to be fading slowly from public view, even as a school text. Meanwhile, the kingdom for which it was composed is increasingly out of touch with its own history. The time may be ripe for a new national epic. But who would compose it? 

John Milton (1608-74) was an unlikely candidate for English national poet. Early in life he seemed destined for the Church. But when he left Christ’s College, Cambridge in the summer of 1632, aged 23, he went into retirement at his father’s house, and spent the next five or six years devoting all his time to reading. When a family friend castigated Milton for his apparent idleness, he replied that he was diligently preparing to serve God. 

Milton actively contemplated composing the English national epic for decades. By 1640, he had narrowed down his list of possible subjects to: 53 stories from the Old Testament; eight from the New Testament; 33 from ancient English history; and five from Scottish history. Yet even at this stage it was obvious that he was most interested in the story of Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Paradise. 

If that interests you, come along and buy a ticket here - but as the venue is quite small, so spaces are limited. If the Canon Club proves to be popular, and fun, we’ll organise some more nights, covering different subjects and with different speakers, and hopefully beyond London. But this is the very first, and I imagine in years to come people will talk about it like it was the Sex Pistols playing in the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, with hundreds of thousands claiming to have been there.