Milton: <span class='italic'>Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes</span>

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521883061.016

14 - Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011

Barbara Lewalski

Edited by

Michael O'Neill

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Michael O'Neill: Affiliation:
University of Durham

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Summary

When the Restoration of Charles II in May 1660 crushed Milton’s political hopes – pursued for twenty years in polemic tracts and service to the English Republic – he did not, as is sometimes supposed, abandon his Reformist ideals for a purely spiritual or aesthetic ‘paradise within’. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are superlative artistic achievements addressed to the ages, but as well, they undertake a strenuous project of educating readers in the virtues, values and attitudes that make a people worthy of liberty, exercising them in rigorous judgment, imaginative apprehension and choice. They also encourage Milton’s countrymen to think again and think better about the ideological and polemic controversies of the English Civil War and its aftermath. Milton’s example of artistic excellence coupled with Reformist political engagement was a profound influence on the Romantic poets – Blake, the young Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley – prompting Wordsworth’s apostrophe, ‘Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour: / England hath need of thee.’

Milton poured into his last three poems all that he had learned and thought and experienced about life, love, artistic creativity, religious faith, work, history, politics, man and woman, God and nature, liberty and tyranny, monarchy and republicanism, learning and wisdom. Also, some of the heterodox theological doctrines he worked out in his De Doctrina Christiana (a Latin manifesto still in preparation while he was composing his last poems) brought distinct literary benefits.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of English Poetry , pp. 255 - 280

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521883061.016 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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