Essays on Milton's developing ideas on liberty, and his republicanism, as expressed in his writings over his lifetime. In his Second Defence of the English People (1654), reflecting on his career as a prose writer, prior to embarking on the composition of Paradise Lost, John Milton identified 'three varieties of liberty without whichcivilized life is scarcely possible, namely ecclesiastical liberty, domestic or personal liberty, and civil liberty'. In retrospect he was able to find in his earlier writings a systematic exposition of the grounds of freedom, and a commitment to expanding its domain through publication and polemic. Taking initiative from both the history of political thought and historicist aesthetics, the essays in this collection (which derive from the International Milton symposium at York) consider the conditions of liberty in Milton's writings, and the contested development of his republicanism, through his career as a civil servant and prose writer, through his great poems, to his posthumous reputation and the appropriation of his works; and they extend laterally to typologies of liberty, the realm of law, prosody, and religious faith and persecution.Winner of the 2002 Irene Samuel Prize for best composite work onMilton. The contributors are: THOMAS CORNS, JOHN CREASER, MARTIN DZELZAINIS, KATSUHIRO ENGETSU, STEPEHN FALLON, BARBARA LEWALSKI, JANEL MUELLER, CHRISTOPHER ORCHARD, GRAHAM PARRY, JOAD RAYMOND, JOHN RUMRICH, QUENTIN SKINNER, ANNE-JULIA ZWIERLEIN.GRAHAM PARRY is Professor of English, University of York; JOAD RAYMOND lectures in the School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia.

This book will change how readers read not only Milton but any poetry. Whereas prose is written in sentences, poetry is written in lines, lines that may or may not coincide with the syntax of the sentence. Lines add an aural and visual mode of punctuation, with some degree of pause and weight at the line-turn. So lineation, the division of poetry into lines, opens a repertoire of possibilities to the poet. Notably, it encourages an enhanced concentration on meaning, rhythm, and sound. It makes metrical patterns possible, with interactions between regularity and deviation; or it makes possible the presence or absence of structural rhyme; or the multiple variations of the line-turn, whether in harmony with syntax or overflowing, in ways that may be either more or less conspicuous. Starting from theories of Derek Attridge, this book develops new methods for exploring the expressive resources of the verse line as exploited by the greatest of English poets, John Milton. Topics examined include: the interaction of strictness and freedom in the rhythms of Milton's line and paragraph; the interfusion of diverse prosodies in a single poem; approaches to free verse; rhyme in the earlier lyric verse and modes of near-rhyme in the later blank verse; the diverse modes of onomatopoeia; and the complex interweavings of prosody and ideology in this very political poet. The great themes and issues and characters of Milton's innovative and always controversial poetry are perceived afresh, being approached intimately through the rich possibilities of the line, and the insights of the approach illuminate the reading of any poetry.