After a short account of Milton's life as a writer, this book guides us through Milton's poetry and polemical prose. What do Milton's words look like when we acknowledge their personal and political history; when we track them from text to text; when we consider both the big learned words and the very small ones; when we consider the frequency and uniqueness of words; when we tackle these issues in the Latin texts; when we consider the possibility that certain words gain or lose value for Milton through his life, or become keywords to a particular text; when we reconsider the question of Milto ... More

After a short account of Milton's life as a writer, this book guides us through Milton's poetry and polemical prose. What do Milton's words look like when we acknowledge their personal and political history; when we track them from text to text; when we consider both the big learned words and the very small ones; when we consider the frequency and uniqueness of words; when we tackle these issues in the Latin texts; when we consider the possibility that certain words gain or lose value for Milton through his life, or become keywords to a particular text; when we reconsider the question of Milton's coinages? This book explains the shape of Milton's writing career and the life-long tension between his literary ambitions and the pressures of political circumstances. The effect on his vocabulary of his campaign to reform his country's church government and its divorce laws was galvanic. He discovered that he enjoyed verbal conflict and he developed a new set of verbal resources. He never got over the experience of writing the divorce tracts. It was still on his mind when he revised his Latin treatise on theology, De Doctrina Christiana. When he was called upon to justify the Long Parliament's execution of Charles I, it forced him to come to terms with the political keywords of his generation. Milton's poetry and prose have been segregated for so long that we have not tended to track his favourite political words into the great poems, where they change their valence.