Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton Nicholas Mcdowell

Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9780691209128,069120912X

Product details:

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691154694
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691154695
• Author(s): Nicholas McDowell

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. 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.

Biographers 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. 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. 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. 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.”

Table contents:

PART I: LONDON AND ST PAUL’S SCHOOL, 1608–25
1. Londiniensis

2. Pure Chaste Eloquence

3. The Pursuit of Universal Learning

PART II: CAMBRIDGE AND CHRIST’S COLLEGE, 1625–9
4. Philology and Philosophy

5. Beginning as a Poet

6. Heroes and Daemons

7. The Poetics of Play and Devotion

PART III: CAMBRIDGE AND HAMMERSMITH, 1629–35
8. Laudian Poet?

9. In Search of Patronage

10. Many Are the Shapes of Things Daemonic

PART IV: HORTON AND ITALY, 1635–9
11. The Circle of Studies

12. Love and Death in ‘Lycidas’

13. Writing and Society in ‘Lycidas’

14. Come un Virtuoso

PART V: LONDON AND ALDERSGATE STREET, 1639–42
15. Becoming a Polemicist

16. The Poetics of Polemic

Notes
Index

People also search:

poet of revolution the making of john milton

poet of revolution philippines

poet of revolutionaries

who was called the poet of the american revolution

poet of the american revolution

what is revolutionary poetry