An indomitable spirit (Sunday 24 February 2008) PICK: Milton:
Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot by Anna Beer POWERFUL POETRY:
Milton‘s literature inspired revolutionary political thought.
GORDON PARSONS explains how poet John Milton stood up all his
life for free speech, revolutionary politics and religious
liberties. “MILTON! Thou should’st be living at this hour,”
wrote Wordsworth in 1802, a time not unlike our own when a
repressive government was using external threats to limit hard-
won freedoms. Modern writers would perhaps be unlikely to summon
that stern puritanical 17th-century poet, who is primarily known
today for one of the great works of the English literary canon,
but is largely unread except in academies. It is not only that
the subtle, Latinate language of Paradise Lost must be
intractable to our texting generation, but that Milton’s own
claim for his vast 12-book epic – to “justify the ways of God to
men” – may not seem all that pressing to an age that has largely
given up on God. Anna Beer’s biogr