ABSTRACT
For John Milton (1608–74) poetry was a vocation, and such is the personal and public importance of his masterpiece Paradise Lost that one can fitly measure the other activities of his life up to its composition according to how they prepared the ground for it or delayed it. Milton’s father was a well-to-do scrivener who gave him a good education and every encouragement to steep himself in literary and musical culture. It was the Civil War that brought him back, and he threw himself into polemical writing on the anti-episcopal front, later on behalf of Cromwell’s government and even in justification of Charles’s execution. The literature of the last quarter of this century was dominated by the massive figure of John Dryden (1631–1700). He was a literary giant of a kind very different from Milton, and his claims are always more difficult to demonstrate than to recognize.
