Votary of freedom

Boyd Tonkin looks at the legacy of the epic poet John Milton

NEVER before have I dared to suggest that Simon Schama might be — not wrong, but in sore need of an extra footnote. Viewers and readers of his The American Future may recall its fervent praise for the "Statute of Religious Freedom" that Thomas Jefferson drafted for the state of Virginia in 1779. This trumpet-call for liberty of conscience was, Schama enthused, "arguably the greatest and bravest thing he ever wrote", and a cornerstone of the freedom that America would export to the world. And very fine Jefferson’s words sound too, with their affirmation that "Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself". Almost as fine, in fact, as the words written 135 years before by a radical Englishman in the pamphlet that, surely, buzzed somewhere in the back — or front — of Jefferson’s brain.

"Let her and Falsehood grapple," proclaimed John Milton in Areopagitica, the 1644 tract against censorship that began the poet’s second career as a polemicist: "Whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" From Massachusetts to Virginia, the Londoner’s chimes of freedom echoed in revolutionary minds. As Milton’s new biographers, Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, put it: "In intellectual terms, Milton is one of the founding fathers of America."

The 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth was on December 9. He was born in 1608 to a property-dealing family living in Bread Street in the City. But the United States that put some – not all – of his most cherished ideals into constitutional practice seems to be surging ahead in the birthday stakes. Here, we have had solid commemorations at Christ’s College, the Cambridge seat of learning where the young prodigy failed to thrive, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and at St Giles Cripplegate, the City church — now marooned in the Barbican — where Milton was buried in 1674 despite having stayed away from all churches for 30 years.

In the US, however, they do things with a little more pizzazz. A few weeks ago, the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn hosted the "Grand Paradise Lost Costume Ball". Guests in Edenic or Satanic garb celebrated the epic that crowned Milton’s career in bittersweet triumph, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 had destroyed the Republican cause to which he devoted almost 20 years as a spin-doctor and civil servant.

The walls were bedecked with 90 works of art inspired by the poem’s war-in-heaven set-pieces and its earthly drama of Adam, Eve and the seductive serpent — part of a tradition of barnstorming illustration that dates to John Baptist Medina’s engravings in 1688. Prominent among the modern takes on Paradise Lost were the paintings of Terrance Lindall, who once drew for Marvel Comics and published some of his Milton phantasmagorias in Heavy Metal magazine. A New York Times reviewer surveyed the Brooklyn pandemonium (a word Milton created) and sneered that the artworks’ fleshy style.

Licensed preachers have more or less given up on Milton. He defeats their categories. Keen on chastity in theory, he married three times (though his daughters spurned him as a tyrant). He rhapsodised over "connubial" passion, and was the opposite of what we call a "puritan". Indeed, he spent years railing against the puritan takeover of the English revolution and their theocratic urge to set up a state religion and persecute "heretics".

The preachers may stay silent, but Milton’s critics make a devilish din. One positive effect of the quatercentenary has been the publication of a handful of books that prove how richly contentious this supreme controversialist remains. For the novice, Neil Forsyth in John Milton: A Biography (Lion Hudson, `A310.99) does his friendly and fair-minded best to make lucid sense of a life and work misted at every turn by the fogs of war — both military and intellectual. Much more original, but less welcoming to non-specialists, Campbell and Corns’ John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (Oxford, `A325) goes doggedly about its scholarly work of disenchantment. It aims to drive away illusions and reveal hidden corners of the truth about a "self-contradictory, self-serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious and cunning" writer. Like many scrupulous researchers, they show their quarry a tough sort of love.

The freedom Milton hailed in politics and religion also meant, to the poet, the freedom to fall. He views liberty not as a stroll in the garden but as the root of tragedy — a necessary, uplifting tragedy. Doomed to freedom, Eve and Adam leave paradise to find that the story of humankind begins. "The world was all before them" — the same world of choice, conflict and difficult togetherness that Milton’s heirs, from Jefferson to Pullman, have sought to interpret by his lights. "They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow/ Through Eden took their solitary way."

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