History: John Milton

Rediscovering John Milton is a bit like stumbling over some ruined palace in an overgrown jungle: you have to hack through lots of classical allusions and conventions, but it's scarcely believable what you uncover.

Milton (1608-1674) was a polemicist for the Puritan government after the Civil War -- a job which cost him his sight. He achieved his life-calling, to write epic poems in English, in later life.

He fell somewhat out of favour with orthodox Christians after his death because of his apparently heterodox views on the Trinity.

Here's a couple of quotes from his earlier poems:

From On Time:
Then long eternity shall greet our bliss 

With an individual kiss,


From Lycidas (a lament to his friend Edward King, drowned in a passage from Chester to the Irish Sea, 1637; the ‘most perfect long short poem in the English language’)

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walk'd the waves

'The 'dear might of him that walk'd the waves' is such a beautiful phrase, a bit of a class apart from your standard hymnody.


Now I'm tackling Paradise Lost itself, with two helps at my side:

• Margery Hope Nicholson's book A Reader's Guide to John Milton (Thames and Hudson). I picked this up in a second-hand bookshop in Cambridge; I expect such bookshops are full of them because it's probably a set text.
  
• Then I'm using this annotated internet version of the great poem.