In Milton's sonnet "When the Assault," in Aereopagitica, and in Paradise Regained, Milton juxtaposes a series of deliberately reluctant and ambivalent soldiers as his heroes, protagonists, and spokesmen. Creating a military culture which disavows its own violence, these works carefully balance aggression, warfare, and militarism against ethical martyrdom, seclusion, and hermit-like devotional withdrawal. As Jesus in Paradise Regained alternates between mercy and judgment, assertion, power, and resignation, his manhood is at stake. Aereopagitica likewise imagines both a soldier and a martyr, a fighter and a mourner, as Miltonic personae. As a white knight who reluctantly fights, Milton makes himself the perfect ethical warrior.

Milton’s last poems operate as an array, a contiguous set of shifts in narrative and generic evaluation published over just a seven-year period. Charles Taylor argues that modernity “must be understood as . . . multiform contestation.” In Milton’s last three poems, it is. As an epic as a sui generis brief epic, and as a tragedy, respectively, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes represent, then, the values, the pressures, and sometimes even the losses, of pluralism. That these positions can overlap, though, is central to Milton’s contribution to a discussion of modernity, contrary to the familiar epochal break and shift of ideas that modernity is usually taken to represent. The different responses to the experience of modernity, while not necessarily modern, are part of that modernity nonetheless. In the introduction, I preliminarily I develop senses of modernity and responses to it. I also explore the relationship between context, fiction, anachronism, and the novel in the reception of Milton three late poems.

Paradise Regained, which opens with an “eremite” (I.10) and ends at home, examines different recurring response to the conditions of modernity: how some people attempt a retreat from the world. By expanding on the Temptation of Jesus (the Son of God in Paradise Regained) by Satan, a set of stories told in the Gospels of Matthew (4:1-11), Mark (1:12-13), and Luke (4:1-13), Milton’s Paradise Regained revises the Temptation in the Desert, casting the world as a series of temptations to be avoided, just four years after Paradise Lost narrates giving into temptation as a felix culpa. To generations of readers, “retreat” comes freighted with political or military connotations that can unfortunately lead the contextual scholar back to the Restoration, i.e., with Milton in retreat from the Stuart monarchy. Paradise Regained proposes a spiritual domestic retreat, and one in which the particular government is irrelevant.

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.