Volume 32, Number 5 · March 28, 1985
Radicals in Defeat
By David Underdown
The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries
by Christopher Hill
Viking (Elizabeth Sifton Books), 342 pp., $20.00
In Milton and the English Revolution, published in 1977, Christopher Hill tried to rescue Milton from literary scholarship. He argued that to appreciate the great Puritan poet we need to understand not only his place in such lofty traditions as Platonism and Christian Humanism, but also his relationship to the great public dramas of his own time, to the passions of revolution and counter-revolution surrounding him. This view was naturally greeted with skepticism in the academic literary circles where attention to historical events is regarded as heresy, but the book was also attacked by historians. Hill had, not for the first time, it was claimed, exaggerated the importance of the far left of the English Revolution, and had failed to prove his contention that Milton was engaged in a conscious or unconscious dialogue with the Revolution's 'radical underground.'
Review, 2813 words
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