Milton and the Romantics

According to Joseph Wittreich, Romantic poets empowered Milton by making him whole again through their readings of his poetry in the future tense, so that poems emerging from one moment of crisis could reflect upon and explain another crisis in history when, once again, terror and tyranny overruled. In the Romantic period, it became a commonplace to link the prophetic Milton to the Romantic poets. This chapter discusses Milton and the Romantics. It examines the Romanticist readings of Paradise Lost and its influence in the writings of the Romantic poets. The chapter examines his tradition of prophecy and oppositional rhetoric, which found its way into the works of the Romantics.

Milton in the Twentieth Century

This chapter examines Milton not as an absolute, but as a concept historically constructed and changing over time. It examines the ways in which the different Miltons are repaired and returned in the twentieth century. Two of those many Milton revivals form the focus of the chapter: one constructed in polemic about how and why to read Milton; and the other constructed in and by the availability of actual Milton editions that were read over the century. The first section discusses Milton's changing place within academia and his movement from being the common property of men of letters and the common reader in general culture to become the sole preserve of the university-bound specialist in the narrower and less-rewarding culture of higher education. The second section examines Milton readership. It outlines Milton's different periodicities of publishing and reading through the twentieth century.

Milton’s Christian Temper

This chapter discusses Milton's Christian temper. It is believed Milton did not belong to any worshipping Christian community. No existing records ecist to attest that he attended Christian service, or associated with a specific parish, or joined congregations. In an age of great divines, pastors, and preachers, Milton acknowledged no indebtedness to any man's ministerial support or guidance. The practice of his Christianity was non-congregational, domestic, and private. Milton's external Christian observance and inner spiritual life were both invisible. He never offered anything approaching a conversion narrative. When Milton approached matters of personal belief, it is intellectually and not experientially. In his Miltonic equivalent of a spiritual biography, the De Doctrina Christiana, he asserted that his search for truth was from his own original systematic exposition of the Christina doctrine. In his The Reason of Church-Government, Milton illustrates his own religious life by illustrating the coercive authority of the Episcopal Church and his conscientious refusal to submit to it. His anticlerical stance and his firm belief in the free debate and liberty to religion encouraged him to write prose and poems of unwavering intolerance of Roman Catholicism. Milton's Christian vision is neither congregation nor a remnant but that of just one man, who is reliant on his own intellectual and spiritual resource, and who, regardless of popular opinion, walked with integrity. Among Milton's critical and anticlerical works are Paradise Lost, The Reason of Church-Government, and Samson Agonistes.

Milton, Marriage, and the Politics of Gender

This chapter investigates the seventeenth-century cultural and historical context of Milton's portrayal the relationship of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. This approach aims to bring the intellectual, doctrinal, and political debates with which he engaged in his portrayal of the relationship between the sexes. The chapter examines Milton' understanding of the ideas of woman, womanhood, and the cultural debates about the relationship of man and woman in marriage and in the household, and the ways in which these conceptions formed his political and theological outlook. Milton's thoughts on gender and marriage, which were grounded in reformation and seventeenth-century Puritan teachings, in political debates on family and political obligation, and in the ideological and imaginative relationships between politics and gender, formed his prose and poetry on the relationship of man and woman.

Milton and His Biographers

This chapter presents an overview of Milton's biographers from the earliest lives of the poet to the year 2000. The life of Milton has been a subject of quite a lot of accounts compared to other early modern English writers, due in part to the availability of early biographies by people who knew him; in part because of the towering status he enjoyed in the English canon despite attempts to unseat him; and in part because of his story, of poetic genius surrounding surviving political engagement, of resolution and moral courage overcoming great physical impairment. Biographers from Cyriak Skinner to Barbara Lewalski are discussed in the chapter, including the ebbs and flows of Milton biography and the ideological partiality among the biographers.

Milton and the Poetry of the Fall

Setting aside his concern with political and theological principles, Milton's most distinctive contribution in culture is his poetry, where he thinks through the consequences of the principles in poetic language, which is more humanly complex than the combative polemics of his prose. This chapter examines Milton's thinking about the Fall of Man. His conception of the Fall is predominantly a meditation on egoism and disobedience, on selfishness and self-sacrificial love, on blindness and recognition. The chapter aims to elucidate some of the poetic means by which Milton draws his reader into the narrative of the Fall. Milton's poetry of the Fall is inter alia the fall of couples to individuals who enclose themselves in self-seeking forms of selfhood; and the fall of reason into modes of self-deception, exemplified by the recourse to the rhetorical questions that close off true reasoning and substitute human wishful thinking for the obedience to divine commands.

Milton on Knowing Good from Evil

Although poetry's morally instructive purpose was a Renaissance commonplace, Milton developed a detailed conception of what it meant. He argued that poems have the power to ‘inbreed in the great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbation of mind, and set the affections in right tune’. Milton was a moralizing poet who was sensitive to the challenge of knowing oneself and staying true to the proper rational ideas. His epics and poems were pegged on the ethic of rational choosing. This chapter examines the kinds of moral knowledge upon which free choice must hang and the capacity of Milton's Adam and Eve to make rational choices. It examines Milton's theodicy, which argued that possession of rational powers enables people to choose between good and evil. The chapter assesses how experience influences the capacity of man for self-determination and choice according to Milton's theodicy. In it, three of Milton's poems, which sum up his moral imagination, are examined: Paradise Lost, Reason of the Church Government, and Areopagitica.

Milton and the Regicide

This chapter discusses Milton and his idea of regicide. It discusses his The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and the concepts of regicide, tyrranicide, and enemy found in his work. Milton's Tenure asserts that a tyrannical ruler should no longer be regarded as one of the powers ordained by God and may be therefore be resisted like a private person who employs unjust force. The chapter also discusses his political theory and his emerging notion of resistance, including the significance of his method of not naming Charles Stuart as a public enemy or hostis in his Tenure.

Milton and the Classics

This chapter discusses John Milton's acquaintance with classical literature, which began early and continued throughout his lifetime. Between 1615 and 1620, Milton entered St. Paul's, which was founded by John Colet, a friend and disciple of Erasmus. St. Paul's was heavily influenced by Erasmus's humanist principles, which centred on a thorough and actively practical engagement with classical literature and civilization. Prior to his education in St. Paul's, Milton was home tutored, which centred on the elements of classical learning. From 1625, Milton continued his studies at Christ's College, Cambridge. During these periods of educational quest, Milton honed his knowledge of classical literature and languages. He mastered Greek and Latin, and acquainted himself with the works of Latin and Greek poets. Even at the onset of his blindness, Milton maintained his acquaintance with the classical literature; he taught his daughter Greek and Latin so she could read to him in those languages. His convictions were centrally grounded in the classics; for instance, his republicanism was grounded in Roman precedent. Milton worked in Latin, and his English poems were steeped in classical forms such as imagery, rhetoric, and allusions. Three of his major works were written in mainstream classical genres: twelve-book epic, pastoral, and Aristotelian tragedy. Milton's poetic language was saturated at the local level of vocabulary, syntax, and metaphorical resonance with Greek and Latin languages.

Milton: Literature and Life

In 1660, upon the Restoration of Charles to the English throne, John Milton went into hiding. His treatises Eikonoklastes and Defensio were condemned and burned. Milton faced the prospect of public execution, but escaped with a brief imprisonment. Three-quarters of a century later, the Milton once vilified for his political polemics was embraced by the public for his verses, which had risen high in England's favour. This chapter discusses Milton's purposes and priorities. The ideal of teaching is, according to Milton, through the ‘delight’ of poetry; for him poetry must function to deplore the general Relapses of Kingdoms and States from justice and God's true worship. Just as with poetry, he looked at prose to instruct the readers by affording them delight, and by calming the perturbation of mind that can impede their reception of truth. Milton believed that just as poetry can impart virtue through charm and smoothness of sounds, prose draws on eloquence to charm the multitude to love what is truly good. In his writings, he pursued the conception of liberty, the strife between good and evil, the principle of free choice, and the sinfulness of the popery. Milton tailored his Restoration poems as bulwarks against the wickedness of the court and nation. His poems served as sharp checks and sour instructions, in the absence of which, many people would have been lost if they were not speedily reclaimed. Some of Milton's works of enlightenment and corrections were Paradise Lost, The Reason of Church Government, and History of Britain.