Although the fifteen essays that comprise this collection are intentionally eclectic, suggesting the diverse topics and works of John Milton that engage contemporary critics, there are nonetheless numerous connections between and among them. A number focus, from varied perspectives, on Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and A Mask, poems that have attracted sustained critical attention. Several consider shorter poems, such as the Nativity Ode, “The Passion,” “Upon the Circumcision,” and “Sonnet 14.” Some pursue issues of sources, authorship, and audience, while others probe extant biographical records or reflect on the author as biographical subject. All contribute to a view of Milton’s works as still meaningful more than three hundred years after his death and underscore the prophetic nature of his remark in The Reason of Church- Government that he might “by intent labour and study . . . leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.”

The prescient quality of Milton’s comment has been demonstrated in the centuries since his death, for while the critical response to the Miltonic legacy has ranged from vitriolic contempt to near idolatry, his works, especially the epics that were yet to be penned when Milton was charting his poetic plans in The Reason of Church-Government, have rarely been ignored. To attack Milton ’s poetic choices, his political views, his God, his Eve, or his Samson, is hardly the same thing as willingly and willfully letting his work die through inattention. Even the young Milton , committed as he was to achieving a place in the annals of poetic history, might have been surprised by the strenuous efforts in “aftertimes,” on the part of detractors as well as supporters, to keep his legacy alive.

These essays were originally among those presented at the 2001 Conference on John Milton, sponsored by Middle Tennessee State University , and, because of their critical merit, the authors were invited to expand their work for this collection. Diverse though they are in subject matter, approaches, and emphases, all demonstrate how Milton scholarship in the twenty-first century continues to be committed to not letting Milton ’s literary legacy die.

LC 2004013641

ISBN 1-57591-086-1

Printed in the U.S.A.

Jacket illustration: A page of Lycidas. Photo courtesy of Trinity College MS R.3.4. Reproduced courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.