Paulin sums up the critical case for Paradise Lost as an allegory for the “lost cause” of the revolution: In any case, he was a passionate believer in the overthrow of kings and the establishment of republics (for which he has become a libertarian hero). California State University’s Michael Bryson has gone so far as to argue that Milton was a secret atheist. Later critics have pointed to Milton’s political writings as evidence that he knew exactly whose party he was of. In 1660, when Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate fell apart and Charles II returned, Milton’s works were banned by royal decree and the poet went into hiding until a general pardon. Milton later published several pamphlets in defense of regicide. Milton had vociferously supported the Puritan revolutionaries who overthrew the king’s father, Charles I, and removed his head. “According to Milton’s early biographer, the Irish republican John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regarded these lines as subversive,” Paulin points out, “and wanted to suppress the whole poem.” It’s surprising he was able to publish at all. On half the nations, and with fear of change Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon “The authorities were concerned,” for example, Tom Paulin notes at The London Review of Books, by an image in Book One describing Satan: The Romantics’ use of Paradise Lost reflects their own preoccupations, while also echoing contemporary suspicions of the poem. These first few hundred lines show why Satan seems so noble to Milton’s readers speeches by and about him portray his doomed campaign as a righteous assault on heavenly tyranny. “Milton composed ‘Paradise Lost’ aloud, in bed or (per witnesses) ‘leaning backwards obliquely in an easy chair,'” Lauren Christensen writes at The New York Times, “memorizing the stanzas to be transcribed in another’s hand.” He conceived the epic in his 50s, his career in government over after the English Civil Wars and the brief period of the Cromwells’ Protectorate ended in the Restoration of Charles II. These are not in Milton’s hand - he had been blind since 1652, and the poem was first published in 1667. The book preserves the only part of the poem that survives in manuscript: 798 lines from Book One of Paradise Lost. But it will not be as beautiful as this sky-blue cloth-covered book with Blake’s full-color illustrations.) (We do hope a subsequent edition will appear, maybe with a transcription and annotations. Only 1,000 numbered, large format copies of this printing are available.
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