Introduction

Abstract

To associate Milton with ‘modernity’ might seem odd. After all, it is now almost a century since Walter Raleigh described Paradise Lost as ‘a monument to dead ideas’. One of Milton’s champions of the middle years of this century, Douglas Bush, produced an image of the poet as in some respects behind even his own time, nearly three centuries earlier: ‘a noble anachronism in an increasingly modern and mundane world’. Milton continues, in the eyes of some, to appear principally in the guise of ‘the last great Renaissance humanist’.In Milton criticism, ‘modern’ has tended to mean ‘these days’, as when Marcia Landy contends that ‘Few modern readers can wholeheartedly affirm the presence of essential truths in Milton; many of his attitudes are alien to the modern world’.For a long time, the terms ‘modernity’ and the ‘modern’ served mainly to describe, at a time when they seemed the latest or dominant trend in the field, the various attacks on Milton initiated by T. S. Eliot and furthered most influentially by F. R. Leavis.KeywordsCivil SocietySeventeenth CenturyPublic SphereModern ReaderParadise LostThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.