Surely something is wrong with the world when the New York Public Library sees fit to devote thousands of square feet to an exhibition about Jack Kerouac, while shunting John Milton, on the 400th anniversary of his birth, into a one-room side gallery. “Oh, how unlike the place from whence he fell!” as the poet of “Paradise Lost” once wrote in a different context. Clearly, the age of Miltonolatry is past. The sublime cadences of his music were no proof against those guns of August that inaugurated World War I, and by the end of that conflagration, our collective ear was yearning for very different harmonies. We have yet to recover.

Perhaps we should be happy that the NYPL is devoting any attention to this monarch of poets, now dethroned, of whom the devoutly Miltonolatrous Walter Savage Landor once wrote, “After I have been reading the Paradise Lost, I can take up no other poet with satisfaction.”

It could also be argued that the NYPL’s modest tribute is the very least it could have done. As every native English speaker knows, Milton (1608–74) was a major poet. But as a culture, we have come to know that as a fact rather than to feel it as an aesthetic emotion. Surely, dissertations are still to be written about the man, and it happens more than one might think that some independent-minded youth will pick up Milton’s poems and be quite dazzled by their brilliance. But still, collectively, we have lost patience with his Latinate idiom and have become suspicious of what we believe, erroneously, to have been his puritanical religion.

The current exhibition, consisting of engravings, first editions, and at least one autographed letter, is only a small part of the Library’s Milton holdings. Those holdings are extensive because two of the 19th-century founders of the NYPL, Samuel Jones Tilden and James Lenox, like so many of their contemporaries, were committed Milton admirers. Back then, surely, America’s affection for the poet was inspired partly by Anglophilia and partly by the country’s Protestant identity. The attempt to transform Milton from a 17th-century, Baroque poet into a recognizably 19th-century Romantic, banalizing him in the process, can be seen in a number of images on view in the NYPL. Among these is an engraving of a domestic interior depicting the great man in advanced age. (The original oil painting is hanging on the third floor.) As his daughters look on in concern, his ashen face is framed by deepening shadows and he looks every bit like Ludwig van Beethoven. At the same time, the exhibition includes another engraving of Milton at age 10.

Though the NYPL exhibition includes dazzling editions of Milton’s early poems, as well as the “Areopagitica,” that heroic defense of a free press, and several religious tracts, most of the works on view are illustrated editions of “Paradise Lost.” The Italian scholar Mario Praz long ago asserted a fascinating comparison between the poet Milton and the painter Poussin. There is much to that, and it would be fascinating to see what a painter of that stature would have made of his contemporary.

The artists on view, however, came much later and, for a variety of reasons, they were very different from Milton. William Blake, a true child of the 18th century, yielded to no one in his love of Milton. But his beautiful, mannered, effetely elongated illustrations could not possibly be further from the oratorical humanism with which Milton conceived his Adam and Eve and his Satan and Archangel Michael. John Martin, a 19th-century master of biblical panoramas, came a little closer to the spirit of the original in his depictions of Satan’s palace, “Pandaemonium,” as a massive, shadowy fortress ravaged by lightning. Gustave Dore, perhaps the finest and most successful illustrator of literary texts, conceives the poem, as he conceived Dante’s “Inferno,” as “Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace / And rest can never dwell, hope never comes / That comes to all; but torture without end / Still urges.”

Invariably, the most interesting items in exhibitions of this sort are the relics — the objects that once belonged to the person in question — that bring us into a sense of physical closeness, even intimacy with the vanished great. One wishes there were more such relics in the current show, but the two on display will do. The first is a letter that Milton wrote in Latin to his Italian friend Carolus Dati. Because of the way it is displayed behind a glass case, its dense jungle of darkened letters is almost illegible. But still, no one with even a trace of literary reverence will not be moved to be in its proximity.

And though this may not sound like much, there is a beat-up volume of poems by Giovanni della Casa that comes to us from Milton’s own library. Della Casa was possibly the finest Italian sonnet writer of the 16th century. He pioneered the enjambment (or continuation) of the eighth line of the sonnet into the ninth. The change results in the mannerist melding of the first part of a sonnet (the octave) into its second part (the sestet). Milton incorporated that trick into his own sublime sonnets and then passed it on to William Wordsworth, with equally memorable results. And here, in a glass case, is the beat-up little volume that first inspired John Milton, with such consequences for the glory of English letters.

Until June 14 (Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, 212-930-0830).