The book’s Part II begins by exploring conversations with antiquity made possible by different kinds of parallel Latin and vernacular composition in early modern poetry. Some of Andrew Marvell’s verse is in Latin, and of particular interest are instances in which Marvell writes Latin and English versions of the same poem: thus Hortus and the more famous Garden read as cross-referential poems that play with, and thematize, the writer’s dual literary competence in English and in Latin. This kind of ‘diptych’ composition is rendered more fully tangible in John Milton’s 1645 double book Poems, both English and Latin, ahead in Chapter 5. However, the midsection of Chapter 4 takes the idea of the cross-linguistic diptych in a different and hypothetical direction: what if one were to imagine a Latin ‘twin’ for every vernacular poem steeped in classical tradition, even in the 99 per cent of cases in which no such twin exists? Such a thought experiment finds special traction in the case of Milton’s Paradise Lost, with an added twist in that early translators were not lacking who actually rendered the Latinate and Virgilian verse of Paradise Lost into post-Virgilian Latin.

Itineraries of poetry across language boundaries do not necessarily entail actual travel on the poet’s part. However, writers ancient and modern did go on excursions to the lands associated with the poetic traditions with which they interacted – as did readers too. Chapter 5 resumes discussion of two poets who appeared in Chapter 4, Joachim Du Bellay in sixteenth-century France (via the French Antiquitez de Rome, the Latin Elegiae, and other works) and John Milton in seventeenth-century England (via the bilingual double book of 1645, its Latin half framed by dedicatory testimonia from learned Italians and by the career-punctuating Epitaph for Damon). For both, language choice would have been an issue even without their ventures abroad; but both use their time in Italy to explore, sharpen, thematize, and problematize transcultural issues of language and identity. Is the passage to Italy a celebration of linguistic cosmopolitanism or a test of linguistic loyalty, a journey home or a journey into exile and alienation? What kinds of language question do poetic travellers to Italy negotiate, and what Rome, or whose Rome, do they find?

This chapter focuses on the role that allusion plays in establishing a shared language of intimacy. It describes how Wollstonecraft and Godwin, in their letters to one another, trade literary allusions as a way of flirting. That practice cast doubt on the transparency of speech, however, since the difficulty of openly expressing feeling, versus the relative ease of slipping into a literary cliché, led to the sense of distrust that also features throughout their letters. The tension between transparency and trust is further explored in the pair’s novels. Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria presents a heroine who falls in love with a man based on the books he reads, in a manner which suggests either quixotic delusion or a defiant trust in the imagination. Godwin’s novels depict scenes of shared reading which rethink his earlier philosophical discussions of personal affection versus independence, and openness versus secrecy or reserve.

The book concludes with a reflection on one of the main features of the joy of love, its unreality: joy is or feels like it is out of this world. For many of the authors surveyed in this book, joy’s unreality does not suggest its naivety or foolishness but its very power to bridge phantasm and reality, the transcendent and the immanent. The conclusion opens up onto the European Renaissance: while the language of phantasmatic love’s joy is taken up by Petrarchist poetry, it is in seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry that is found the continuation of a language of love’s joy as the arresting and expansion of the present moment. John Donne and Thomas Traherne write of a joy that is here and now yet experienced as an everywhere, they write of its power to bring us out of ourselves and to reveal the transcendent within human love.

‘The task of criticism', Johnson writes, ‘is to establish principles.’ One principle which forms the background to much of Johnson’s literary criticism is that of human fallibility. Writers and their works usually contain a mixture of great virtues and serious defects, and Johnson often takes a balancing-scales approach. He is also keenly aware of historical context, arguing that authors must be understood through the books the authors themselves read, and taking an interest in the details of book production. As for critical judgement, Johnson approves of works which reveal the universality of human nature – hence his love of Homer, and, conversely, his strictures on the Metaphysical poets. As well as being accountable to truth and nature, the writer is also accountable to the reader, and by extension the ‘public’ and ‘mankind’. Above all, literature must pay its due to religion – though this is precisely the area where literature is likely to fall short.

As the most ‘delightful’ and ‘useful’ of genres, biography occupied a high place in Johnson’s ranking of literary genres, and he wrote many kinds of biography. All were aimed at raising the audience’s moral aspirations, showing them what was humanly possible. By the same token, sentimental panegyrics were no use, because they were too unrealistic to help the reader; they might also be based on falsehood, and Johnson is consistently sceptical towards stories that sound too good to be true. In his early biographies, Johnson explicitly draws conclusions about virtue and vice – even condemning his late friend Richard Savage, who despite his many admirable qualities set a dangerous example of contravening ordinary ethical standards. Yet by the time Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets more than three decades later, he approached these questions more subtly, speculating on the connection between bad morals and bad writing, and delivering his lessons with restrained irony.

During the Interregnum, figures such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Milton produce substantial works of political philosophy. As can be seen in their titles, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (1651), Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), each set out to describe a commonwealth. For Hobbes, Harrington, and Milton, the question after 1649 is how to understand – and, in some cases, how to reconstitute — the “one” that is at the Greek root of monarch. None of the proposals created, under the great pressures of the moment, could be implemented; however, they offered models for English-language political philosophy for decades, even centuries, to come. Later generations had a reservoir of English-language republican actions, rhetoric, and philosophy on which to draw, including in Ireland.

Max Weber understood how democracy in the seventeenth century was tied to Calvinist individualism and the rejection of external forms. Thomas Hobbes hated the consequences of puritan rule and argued that politics needed to accept the principle of the mask in order to create social order. The lawyer William Prynne in his Histrio-mastix portrayed theatre as the root of all evils in the royalist regime, but he himself proved a masterly performer in working to undermine the regime. The most radical democratic thinking came from the ‘Levellers’ who harked back to the Garden of Eden and natural human innocence. Shakespeare interrogated the ambivalent myth of Eden in Henry VI Part Two, as did Milton in Paradise Lost. The Putney debates constitute the main focus of this chapter. Common soldiers with Leveller views argued with their generals about constitutional principles. Close analysis of the debate reveals the complications that followed from claims to sincerity, couched as insistence that because God had spoken to them speakers were following their consciences, avoiding rhetoric or hypocrisy. The religious context in fact allowed a high level of democratic exchange.

John Milton is a major author in the history of writing the nation in early modern England. A visionary Protestant writer with a keen sense of prophetic vocation, he aligned his authorial identity closely with England as an exceptional ’Nation chos’n before any other’. Yet in his works written before, during and after the English Revolution, Milton agonises over the godly nation’s susceptibility to political and religious servility, so that he vacillates between intense identification with England and strong repulsion. Milton’s evolving relation to the nation thus remains conflicted and volatile. England’s exceptionalism can never be taken for granted: it must be strenuously tested, reassessed and reimagined. Although the late Milton turns away from national exceptionalism and challenges Restoration’s cultural, religious and political values, the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost, published close to the Glorious Revolution, tells another complex story about the posthumous creation of Milton as England’s exceptional national poet.

This chapter explores georgic writing that appeared during the second half of the seventeenth century, with special attention to engagements with civil war and its aftermaths. The discussion also attends closely to Virgilian strains in English georgic writing and to the significances of literary imitation and translation. Authors covered include Andrew Marvell, John Evelyn, Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Joseph Addison and John Dryden, as well as the ancient writers Hesiod and Virgil.

Milton’s Sonnet XVIII (‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’) propounds a familiar opposition between the ‘pure’ religion of Protestants and a corrupt Catholicism obsessed with material objects and images (‘stocks and stones’). Yet this ostensibly anti-Catholic poem veers brazenly and repeatedly into the language of relic veneration. Beginning with the poignant spectacle of the Waldensians’ bones scattered on the mountainsides, the sonnet goes on to weaponize human remains and grants them sacred force in the form of ‘martyred blood and ashes’ to be sprinkled over Italy. This chapter explores historical, confessional, and literary contexts for Sonnet XVIII’s surprising investment in human remains, both as objects arousing pity and as capable of a kind of material efficacy. Milton’s poem is situated within an extensive tradition of English Protestant poets and preachers, including Michael Drayton, John Donne, and Richard Crashaw, who had wrestled with the question of relics and the problem of scattered bones.

Milton's sonnets, which present Milton's self as a fictionalized persona, reveal the ways in which Milton's masculinity and his subjectivity interact in a highly masculinized poetic form. In his political and personal sonnets, Milton makes himself a vulnerable but also authoritative figure who makes his own authority through poetic form. Claiming public status while eschewing public alliances, creating enemies while claiming popularity, and naming friends while walking in solitary glory, Milton's sonnet-speakers confirm the ambivalent, tactical, and self-authorizing manhood which is Milton's default.

The Introduction describes the kinds of masculinism and forums for manhood in Milton's works that the book will study. Outlining the chapters and framing the theory and cultural history underlying the book, the Introduction places its study of Milton's masculinity in current scholarly conversations on gender, queer theory, critical race theory, and Milton's major works. Using "Lycidas" and Milton's sonnets as frames, the Introduction shows how Milton makes his own manliness.

This chapter explores Blake’s vocation to a public role and his exploration of creativity and conformity in his engagement with the Bible, literature and art. In his engagement with Milton and the Bible, Blake carved out for himself a creative space in his use of both, and criticised their shortcomings, while recognising the significance of what he had taken from them.In wrestling with Milton’s texts, Blake pioneered an interpretative method for any who sought a more creative and contemporary relationship with the tradition they received. Similarly, engaging with the Bible’s major themes informed his critique of the contemporary church and politics and enabled him to criticise other, to him, less palatable biblical themes, as well as pointing to a different kind of society. In so doing, Blake brought out the latent meaning of the words of the Bible, exposing the shortcomings of the biblical texts while preserving their truths. A crucial part of this hermeneutical process is the way in which Blake regarded boundaries and constraints as the necessary complement to inspiration and imagination, both crucial components of Blake’s art and his understanding of human life.

The word ‘hero’ in ancient terminology does not refer to the ’hero’ of a poem or play, and ancient epics do not require a central hero to unify the action. This understanding of the role of the leading figures in epic is still current for John Milton in Paradise Lost.

From Homer on, the first similes in epic are strongly paradigmatic and symbolic; they emblematise an order on the human or cosmic scale, showing a contest between order and chaos. This pattern is analysed from Homer, Lucretius, Virgil and Lucan up to Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose first similes show a deep understanding of this ancient template.

The afterword considers the crisis of experience in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Samson’s uncertainties about God’s plans and his difficulties interpreting his own heart capture the plight of the godly individual in a world with a hidden God (a deus absconditus). His desire for freedom and his will to instigate political action in the absence of divine guidance capture the modern condition inaugurated by the nominalist sense of God’s distance and inscrutable power. Baffled by his own inner promptings and unable to tolerate this opacity, Samson feels compelled to experiment and hazard his strength against his enemies. Samson’s skeptical doubt results in revenge and apocalyptic violence. The sublime ending – its atmosphere of dread and horror subdued by twisting rhetorical summations – captures the dialectic of skepticism and the sublime. The illegibility of private experience – with its explosive possibilities – provides a fitting conclusion to a book about skeptical doubt in early modern English literature.