Milton

Drawn from lectures Raleigh gave as Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, this short study reads the life and work of John Milton as a single argument, treating the poet’s temperament, politics, and craft as inseparable. Raleigh opens with a biographical sketch of Milton’s Puritan London, his years of pamphlet controversy, and his later blindness, then turns to the poetry: the early Comus and Lycidas, the later poems, and above all the vast design of Paradise Lost. He traces Milton’s debts to Spenser and the Elizabethans, and shows how the upheavals of the Civil War pressed questions of liberty and moral order deep into the verse. Written in clear, unhurried prose, it remains one of the more approachable introductions to Milton, valued by later readers for the soundness of its judgment.