Chapter 6 argues that Milton’s priorities in Paradise Regained are moral rather than Christological or political. The chapter applies this thesis to some enduring critical questions around the poem: the question of the Son’s identity, the purpose of the temptation, and the nature of the poem’s outcome; lastly it shows how Satan is like a Washington lobbyist. The consequence of this reading is to make Paradise Regained appear at once simpler and more demanding. The poem makes strenuous moral demands upon its readers, not because its messages are esoteric but because it calls them to follow the example of the Son.

Chapter 4 examines a test case for the book’s account of Milton’s political priorities: Milton’s view of the Cromwellian Protectorate. The Protectorate presents a test case because it was a monarchy, and it has often been alleged that Milton grew more disaffected with Cromwell’s government as it grew more monarchical in its later phase. The findings here cast doubt on this view. While the Cromwellian religious settlement fell short of the disestablishment Milton wanted, Cromwell favored religious toleration more strongly than his parliaments did, and Milton supported him in foreign affairs. The chapter’s upshot is to reinforce a claim made in the Introduction: not that Milton lacked principles, but that his firmest principles were not constitutional ones.

Chapter 2 continues the previous chapter’s thick description of Milton’s anticlericalism, commencing with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and proceeding to the sonnet “Cromwell, our Chief of Men,” Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church, and Paradise Lost. The chapter concludes by discussing the continuity and causes of Milton’s anticlericalism; lastly it situates Milton’s radically anti-institutional view of the church within an ecclesiological divide that extends back to Augustine and the Donatists.

Chapter 7 defends the view that Milton intended his hero as a hero, morally superior to his various interlocutors and divinely favored at the end. It examines prominent counter-arguments in recent criticism: the argument from source modification, the argument from multiple traditions, and the argument from contrast with Christ. Its final section considers the poem’s politics, and whether it is anachronistic to call Samson Agonistes a work in praise of terrorism.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide a thick description of Milton’s anticlericalism, tracing it through his career, describing its main recurring features and the changing contexts in which these features recur. They show that Milton’s anticlericalism was propositional as well as attitudinal: not merely a dim view of priests (though he certainly had that) but a core element of his thought. The two chapters tell a single chronological story, divided for greater uniformity in length. Chapter 1 describes the first emergence of Milton’s anticlericalism in “Lycidas”; its full-blown emergence in the antiprelatical tracts of the early 1640s; Areopagitica; “On the New Forcers of Conscience.”

Chapter 5 concerns the politics of Satan’s rebellion, which it reads not topically but as a narrative challenge that Milton approached rather as a historical novelist would, inventing within parameters. Milton imagines a deeply hierarchical heaven, and the trouble starts, in Milton’s telling, when God deliberately alters the heavenly hierarchy by exalting his Son. The problem of heavenly hierarchy leads to the broader problem of obedience tests, biblical and Miltonic; and that problem leads to still broader questions of theodicy and Milton’s use of Scripture. The chapter’s argument supports the Empsonian view that the deepest difficulties in Paradise Lost are inherited ones.

Sets out the book’s main themes: Milton’s anticlericalism; his enduring concern to maximize liberty of conscience for heterodox godly lay intellectuals; Milton’s republicanism and its relatively minor place amongst his priorities; his political writing to be understood as partisan and polemical, not as philosophy; “follow the particular”; Milton’s multifarious, unsystematic liberty-talk; “strenuous liberty;” Milton’s tolerationist thought as proceeding from the lower ground; Milton’s poetry and prose not politically at odds, but differing in subject matter, audience, and purposes; unrepentant politics of the late poems. Brief discussion of archive and methods; summary of chapters.

Chapter 3 provides a case study in Milton’s strategic self-positioning. It argues against the hitherto prevailing view that Milton attempted to reclaim the terms “heresy” and “heretic.” It is shown here that he never did. Milton did however develop an unusual understanding of these terms, and the chapter describes how and why he did so. In so doing so it considers the role that Milton’s view of heresy played in his broader thinking about religion, and considers what this matter tells us about Milton’s sense of his own relation to his audience.

Chapter 6 situates John Milton’s major works – Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes – in relation to abiding conflicts over fiscal policy prompted by the Civil War and its aftermath. Milton was actively critical of the Commonwealth’s management of fiscal policy and voiced his fear about the fiscal impact of a restored monarchy. Though fiscal concerns are largely occluded from his poetry, Milton’s depiction of war and its effects continues this critique by dramatizing the disastrous consequences of security imaginaries organized around the violently expansive accumulation of wealth. Milton’s metasecurity dilemma arises in his poetry as a question about how to value people and circumstances correctly, about the relevant criteria to use to orient oneself ethically and politically within catastrophic realities. His poems thus highlight Milton’s deep uncertainty about how to define safety or about what kinds of collective security might be possible in such a disoriented moment.

This chapter works backward from the glossary of terms in Joseph Moxon’s 1683 printer’s manual and a 1684 poem that uses those terms extensively to show how the less technical, more widespread set of terms collected in this book demonstrate considerable rhetorical and conceptual flexibility. Two key terms, “bookish” and “set forth,” begin an exploration of how the language of books gave people a way to describe their culture and situate themselves within it.

This chapter examines some of the most important poetic influences on Shelley’s writing from the tradition of poetry in English published before his birth in 1792. In particular, it focuses on Shelley’s inheritance of works by Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare while acknowledging the breadth of his reading and its influence on his own poetic practice (the chapter also acknowledges that Shelley’s inheritance from English poetry must be considered in the context of his inheritance of work in Greek, Latin, and a range of modern European languages, which is discussed elsewhere in this volume). The chapter attempts to tease out some of the ambivalences in Shelley’s relation to his poetic forebears, taking Spenser – royalist and imperial apologist, which Shelley emphatically was not – as a crucial example here.

This chapter explores Gerard Manley Hopkins’s relationship to the tradition of the ode, most especially in his poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. It traces Hopkins’s scholarly interest in the odes of antiquity, particularly those of Pindar, and examines how this engagement with the classical tradition shaped ‘The Wreck’. ‘The Wreck’ is then contextualized within Romantic and Victorian approaches to the ode through comparisons with major odes by John Milton, William Wordsworth, and Lord Alfred Tennyson. Hopkins’s engagement with the ode embodies a Romantic concern with personal feeling but shares his fellow Victorians’ concern with the ode as a poem of public occasion while retaining the explicitly Christian orientation that animated Milton’s use of the form. The chapter closes with a brief consideration of Hopkins’s unrealized plans to write an ode on the life of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion.

This chapter discusses the sonnet as a context for Hopkins’s poetry. It traces the history of the form and observes the nature of its popularity in the nineteenth century, noting the influence particularly of Milton and Wordsworth. Ideas about the generative potential of restricted poetic forms shape Hopkins’s experimentation with the sonnet. The chapter closes by asserting that while Hopkins’s innovative approach to the sonnet is clear, he found richest expression not so much by explicit departures from received poetic forms as he did within and through those forms.

In January, 1649, James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, signed a treaty with the Catholic Confederacy, not knowing that the king on whose behalf he spoke was on trial in London. On January 30, 1649, Charles is executed, and a week later England became a republic, having a nonmonarchical form of government. A Council of State was created, and John Milton was appointed its “Secretary of Foreign Tongues.” The Council charged Milton to write observations on Ormond’s peace treaty and other recent documents from Ireland. The most geographically interesting reflection on Ireland to involve Milton’s work the resulting Articles of Peace offers a map of Ireland, a cultural and political geography overlaid on the ancient provinces of the island, to which Milton adds complicated interisland tensions, on the eve of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland. Articles reflects the complexity of the situation in Ireland, ramified by English management: A Protestant Royalist signs an extraordinarily generous Peace Treaty with Irish Catholics; the Parliamentary representative in Dublin complains of English influence; the Ulster-Scots make the case for a Protestant Church in Ireland that is neither Anglican nor Episcopalian.

Lord Lieutenant Thomas Wentworth, arriving in Ireland in 1633, unified disparate Ireland into opposition, culminating in his 1641 impeachment, trial, and execution in London. Months later, Ulster and then Ireland more broadly, rose in rebellion. Milton’s first published prose works, including his formative anti-prelatical tracts precede and follow the Ulster Rising. Increasingly Milton addresses Ireland, and the Rising. In James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, Milton finds an Irish interlocutor, and foil.

Days after the execution of Charles I, Eikon Basilike, a book purported to be written by the king, was published posthumously. Parliament commissioned Milton to write a response. With chapters on Wentworth’s execution and the Irish Rising of the early 1640s, Ireland is threaded throughout Charles’ Eikon Basilike and Milton’s response, Eikonoklastes. When Milton began writing Eikonoklastes, Cromwell was preparing to invade Ireland. By the time Eikonoklastes was published, in October of 1649, Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland had been underway for two months. Its most infamous battles, the siege of Drogheda had already taken place. In 1650, Milton publishes a revised second edition of Eikonoklastes, in which he hits upon the term “pluralist,” and invokes it scornfully against his opponents in Ireland. Milton is now up against a principle: pluralism, which Milton implies is built into the cultural and political map of Ireland. As Milton confronts in Ireland a different way of thinking about government, administration, and policy, the Stuart idea of Great Britain must be defeated in Ireland, because it threatens a century-old project of centralization.

Milton’s poem, “Lycidas,” written in memory of Edward King, who drowned sailing from England to his native Ireland, represents a turning point in Milton’s development, his culminating intervention in the ancient pastoral elegy tradition. Considered archipelagically, “Lycidas” narrates a crisis that is spiritual, political, and regional at the same time: A Cambridge-educated Protestant, King represents an interisland possibility for Irish reformation, lost. With “Lycidas,” Milton rereads Spenser’s "Colin Clouts," revising Spenser’s earlier poem. A new, better-educated Colin – Edward King – does not come home again. The loss of Edward King alters what Milton thinks could have been a more positive, reformed relationship on both sides of the Irish Seas.

After nine months in Ireland, Cromwell is recalled to London. Andrew Marvell writes “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return,” an ambiguous encomium. In Ireland, Cromwell’s early return to London is largely forgotten in public memory. By revising existing English-language discussions of Ireland, and incorporating its demographic variety into an emerging idea of “the Irish,” Milton contributes to reconceptualizing Ireland from pluralist variety to a new, flatter pairing, “the Irish” and “the English.” The Cromwellian conquest produces a stronger Irish Catholic identitarian response, as can be seen in the November 1649 meeting of “The Archbishops, Bishops, and other Prelates” at Clonmacnoise (and their subsequent, 1650 publication, to which Cromwell and Milton both responded). Around the same time that Certaine Actes and Declarations of the Clonmacnoise conference was published, the Council of State assigned Milton the task of responding to Defensio Regia pro Carolina I, by Salmasius. Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland is wrapped into Milton’s response, known in English as A Defence of the People of England (1651).