ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a few facts about the environment, education and character of the young John Milton, and offer a few reflections upon those facts. The poet’s father, also named John, was the son of Richard Milton of Stanton St John, a pleasant little village about two and a half miles north of Headington, near Oxford. Milton had far more of the temper of the new rationalism, the dogmatism of the great individual system-builders from Descartes and Spinoza to Hegel. What exactly Milton believed that Christianity added, offered in addition, to the achievements of classical antiquity is very difficult to determine. In the lectures on Milton’s shorter poems the author shall try to make a continual use of what Mr T. S. Eliot has called the critic’s two chief tools, analysis and comparison. It is not really possible to use either of these tools successfully without also making an almost simultaneous use of the other.
