The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 5a

John Milton and Ignatius In Confederacy, Ignatius mentions that he should end his Miltonic isolation and become engaged with the world (chapter 5, section 4, page 109 in the 1980 edition). In Samuel Johnson’s essay on Milton in his Lives of the English Poets, he makes fun of Milton. Milton makes a grand claim that he needs to return to England because he has to participate in the revolution against Charles I. But when he gets to England, he simply gets a job teaching at a private boarding school. For example, Johnson wrote: "Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens home, because his countrymen are contending for liberty, and, when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school" (page varies with edition).

Thesis: Compare Milton’s big talk and small walk to the same pattern in Ignatius’s behavior.