User:Ottava Rima/Milton

Campbell and Corns
"Milton, on our account, is flawed, self-contradictory, self-serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious, and cunning. He is also among the most accomplished writers of the Caroline period, the most eloquent polemicist of the mid-century, and the author of the finest and most influential narrative poem in English. Janus-faced, he looks back to the world of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, and forward to Dryden and to Pope [...] He knows hiw own worth, his singularity, his specialness. He is the most scholarly of poets, a master of classical culture and learning, a humanist in the great tradition of Hugo Grotius or John Selden, and he had a thorough appreciation of modern writers of continental Europe, and particularly of Italy. He studied law, mathematics, history, philology, and theology. He was also a thoughtful and innovative teacher." p. 3