Milton's Tercentenary

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About this book

For the three hundredth anniversary of John Milton's birth, Henry A. Beers considers why the poet still commands attention when readers' tastes and beliefs have shifted. Delivered before Yale University's Modern Language Club, the address weighs the lasting force of Milton's rhythm and style against aspects of his theology and personality that Beers finds harder to admire. Paradise Lost, Lycidas, Comus and the sonnets provide points of reference.

Beers connects literary craft with character, scholarship and public argument. He discusses Milton's classical learning, his ideas about education and his defense of personal liberty, then turns to the relationship between English Puritanism and Yale's own history. Readers interested in criticism can follow a clear argument about how poetry outlasts the assumptions of its age, while also seeing how one university speaker understood Milton's place in English literature.