Tuesday, January 18, 2022

The Blind Poet Who Saw Visions of Religious and Political Freedom

Fiona Sampson reviews Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton, by Joe Moshenska, at The New York Times.

"This is a Milton who, while still at Cambridge, has 'a deep and durable conviction that he was destined to write,' although it seems almost anachronistic to have professed such a belief at the time. But he was, after all, a member of an emergent middle class, with the means to entertain such plans. His father was a moneylender as well as a musician, and Milton too would become both a moneylender and a landlord."

See Milton, "Minor English Poems", Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Areopagitica, in Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 54 Vol., 1952) volume 32, (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 29.

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