A groundbreaking biography of Milton’s formative years that provides a new account of the poet’s political radicalization John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost—but would first justify the killing of a king. Biographers of Milton have always struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious toleration, and republicanism. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography of Milton’s formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist. He charts Milton’s development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton’s best-known works from this period, including the “Nativity Ode,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Comus, and “Lycidas.” Challenging biographers who claim that Milton was always a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that provoked civil war in England combined with Milton’s astonishing programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece.

'Making Darkness Light is an illumination' Adam Phillips 'His sympathetic yet challenging account will undoubtedly win Milton new readers - and for that a chorus of Hallelujahs' Spectator For most of us John Milton has been consigned to the dusty pantheon of English literature, a grim puritan, sightlessly dictating his great work to an amanuensis, removed from the real world in his contemplation of higher things. But dig a little deeper and you find an extraordinary and complicated human being. Revolutionary and apologist for regicide, writer of propaganda for Cromwell's regime, defender of the English people and passionate European, scholar and lover of music and the arts - Milton was all of these things and more. Making Darkness Light shows how these complexities and contradictions played out in Milton's fascination with oppositions - Heaven and Hell, light and dark, self and other - most famously in his epic poem Paradise Lost. It explores the way such brutal contrasts define us and obscure who we really are, as the author grapples with his own sense of identity and complex relationship with Milton. Retracing Milton's footsteps through seventeenth century London, Tuscany and the Marches, he vividly brings Milton's world to life and takes a fresh look at his key works and ideas around the nature of creativity, time and freedom of expression. He also illustrates the profound influence of Milton's work on writers from William Blake to Virginia Woolf, James Joyce to Jorge Luis Borges. This is a book about Milton, that also speaks to why we read and what happens when we choose over time to let another's life and words enter our own. It will change the way you think about Milton forever.