Cold War Milton

Abstract

Careful analysis of the historical context in which the first (1953) volume of Yale's magisterial edition of Milton's prose works, ‘Yale I,’ was produced reveals how the Milton it represents was shaped by current events – specifically, how Cold War developments threatened editor Don Wolfe's very American vision of what a liberal society should be. The exhaustive historical detail provided in Yale I's textual apparatus, its introduction and notes, not only portrays the political turmoil of seventeenth-century England but also represents Milton as a fierce opponent of political dangers clearly perceived as similar to those rampant in Cold War America – dangers such as McCarthyite anti-Communism, the rise of the defence-driven research university, and the ascendancy of that institution's favourite form of literary studies, the New Criticism. Ironically, Wolfe's presentism safeguarded historicist interest in Milton, inoculating Milton studies not only against the de-historicizing drive of New Criticism but also against the later innovations of the New Historicism.