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Abstract LOHN MILTON’s posthumous life-his early crowning as an English classic, his lighthouse stature amidst storms and shifting tides of taste, his powerful literary influence and the influence of some of his ideas-could well be the subject of another book, and, indeed, books and doctoral dissertations have been written on some of these matters. The story of his after-fame can be told bibliographically (a book yet to be written), or as chapters in histories of literature, or criticism, or thought, or pedagogy, or scholarship. It can be told almost dispassionately now, after three hundred years, though perhaps the most conspicuous fact to be reported is that the character and personality of this man have aroused deep admiration and intense dislike in many people from the time of his death to the present day. In 1687 William Winstanley growled, ‘His fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff and his memory will always stink’- and then proceeded to include him in his collection of 147 Most Famous English Poets. Nearly a hundred years later, Dr. Johnson felt, spoke, and acted the same way. The paradox has proved timeless; noisy partisanship is still awed by Paradise Lost. In our own century, while some have been concerned to ‘de-Massonize’ Milton (a Smart expression) and still others have been concerned to dethrone him as a tyrannical influence on poetry, a vigorous, expanding literary scholarship in America has found him an increasingly attractive subject for research and criticism. I have had the strange experience of trying to dissuade one of my own students from praying to Milton every night. She was a Roman Catholic nun, and she had found him a saint, despite his harsh pronouncements on her religion. She was less like Hilaire Belloc, who saw him as a great poet with unfortunate convictions, than like Carlyle, who called him ‘the moral King of authors’. It would seem that both Paradise Lost and Milton the man still have power to move us.