Why Milton Stands Between Two Periods

The idea

Milton belongs to two periods at once, and the exam may place him in either. He was formed in the early seventeenth century, a Cambridge scholar who prepared himself deliberately for the poet's vocation, writing "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" as a matched pair of days, mirth and melancholy, and "Lycidas," a pastoral elegy for a drowned friend that asks what fame is worth, attacks a corrupt clergy, and ends on "fresh woods, and pastures new." Through the Civil War he was a public man, arguing in Areopagitica against licensing books before printing, defending the king's execution and serving the Commonwealth as Latin Secretary, until he was totally blind by sixteen fifty-two, the loss behind the sonnet that ends "They also serve who only stand and wait." Yet his great works came after the Restoration of sixteen sixty: Paradise Lost in sixteen sixty-seven, then Paradise Regained, on Christ's temptation, and Samson Agonistes, on a blind captive, in sixteen seventy-one. Paradise Lost tells the Fall in unrhymed blank verse and the grand style, with an invocation, a beginning in the middle of things, a catalogue, long similes and a descent into Hell, all to justify the ways of God to men. Eve is deceived and Adam falls knowingly, and the pair leave Eden hand in hand. Its Satan, eloquent and defiant, divided its readers: the Romantics saw a hero, and Christian critics such as C. S. Lewis disagreed. To answer a Milton question, read the passage for its speaker and its purpose, and remember that a defiant speech in Hell is not the poem's verdict.