This volume aims to supply in brief compass a body of materials which will be useful in the scholarly study of the poet Milton. Life is too short to permit many men to master the detail embodied in David Masson's seven volume biography, not to speak of the additions which have been made to Miltonic lore since Masson's time. It is too short, even, to exhaust the data contained in Milton's own voluminous works. The need of a "ready and easy way" is witnessed by the numerous brief lives and by the annotated school editions of the poems and selections from the prose. Something more comprehensive seems, however, desirable. The mature student will wish to survey Milton's entire literary activity, to be in possession of the essential facts regarding the origin, dates, and circumstances of his individual works, and to have, at least in brief, the assured or reasonably assured results of learned activity on the many other issues and points of interest about him. It is only thus that his significance in English literature can be understood or his greatness properly estimated. Oddly enough no companion to Milton studies, comparable in scope to the available Shakespeare and Chaucer handbooks, has ever been written. In undertaking to supply the deficiency I have tried to select from the vast mass of material available what seemed most relevant and useful, giving in the footnotes a running bibli ography (indexed at the end of the volume) which will enable the student to pursue the subject further at any point. I have necessarily left to the editors and to the various special dictionaries of Milton's language and allusions (listed in the general bibliography) the task of supplying a detailed interpretation of the texts. Discussion of purely critical problems is also omitted, though the general course of Miltonic opinion is sketched in the final chapter. The first process in the study of Milton should be interpretation rather than judgment, and it is to this end that the materials given in the present volume are aimed. In view, finally, of the ready accessibility in cyclopedias and elsewhere of summary statements of the outward events of Milton's life, and because I am convinced of the superior value of the documents themselves over any modern digest of them, I have substituted for the usual biography the statements of Milton himself and those who knew him, arranged according to the accepted periods of his career. Of the inadequacy of this handbook to represent the field in which it enters, I am well aware. Miltonic scholarship and interpretation, in distinction from purely aesthetic criticism, have made great strides of late. The discussions are complex and their full results as yet unmeasured. But it is quite certain that the present generation, in discarding many traditional presuppositions and prejudices, and in bringing to bear new data of importance, is in the way of attaining a sounder conception of Milton's essential quality and significance. Interest in him has been wider in the past, but it was never more vital than it is to-day. The glory of his utterance is as highly valued as ever, the power of his poetic and phil osophic thought, as contrasted with the dogmatic aspects of his inherited theology, much more so. His personality, seen in the light of modern psychological knowledge, is no longer to be envisaged, whether with enthusiasm or dislike, in the simple terms of Puritanism, but rather as a complex of emotions and restraints which constitutes one of the most curious phenomena in the annals of poetic genius. The present volume deals with these matters all too briefly. It will, however, at least guide the reader to the most important of them and it will be justified if it assists him to see Milton in clearer focus as the great figure in whom the intellectual and aesthetic enthusiasms of the Renaissance, the moral forces of the Reformation, and the fervor of a patriotic love of liberty met at their height and dwelt together for a moment, not inharmoniously. My obligations to authorities, particularly to the more recent ones, are pretty well indicated in the footnotes. But I have omitted specific references to the authority to whom I owe the most-David Masson. His work is thoroughly indexed, and it may be assumed to be my general source for all biographical and historical data where no other is mentioned. (1) Composition and Publication (2) Expository Outline (3) Cosmology and Doctrinal Content (4) The Literary Sources . |