ABSTRACT
By the most notable difference between Milton's virtue ethics and Puritan morality, is that the godly never portray personal trial by 'what is contrary' as an 'ingredient of virtue'. Neither its richly sensuous poetics, its monist metaphysics, nor its humanist ethics seems to support the current view, which has turned a Spenserian morality play into a thinly disguised anti-Laudianism protest. According to Lewalski, Milton's version of this ethic first appears Arcades, which like Comus develops 'a stance toward art and recreation that repudiates both courtly aesthetics and Puritan wholesale prohibitions'. David Sedley finds Milton adopting and refining Neoplatonic and other courtly motifs as ingredients in what will later become his grand style, while John Hollander adds that the young poet seems to be looking both backward and forward: he looks back a time when 'the harmony of word and sound' had not been soured by the approaching culture wars, and forward to future whose horizons remain ever open and renewable.
