' the crucial question is the one that has defined and divided Milton scholarship from the beginning, the question of politics. Poet of Revolution will be the standard account of its subject, and the starting point for further discussion of Milton’s early life, for a long time to come'-Rhodri Lewis, Prospect ' transforms our understanding of Milton’s emergent worldview with intelligence, authority and considerable flair. 'A terrific work of scholarship.'-Jonathan Bate, Catholic Herald tour de force.'-Roberta Klimt, Times Literary Supplement McDowell manages to shine new light even on some of the best-trodden territory.

Ideas Podcast | Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton’s best-known works from this period, including the “Nativity Ode,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Comus, and “Lycidas.”Ĭhallenging biographers who claim that Milton was always a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that provoked civil war in England combined with Milton’s astonishing programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece. He charts Milton’s development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography of Milton’s formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist.

Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost-but would first justify the killing of a king.īiographers of Milton have always struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious toleration, and republicanism. John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions.

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