There's a brief article here from The Weekly Standard about John Milton, my favorite poet, and, incidentally, a great figure in libertarian history. Milton will be 400 years old next month. (The article erroneously says 500).
I enjoyed Mr. Weider's observation that "Unless the epics are read aloud, it's impossible to hear them, no matter how developed the inward ear. This presents a daunting task for a generation taught to read to itself without moving the lips." I first read Paradise Lost on the bus to work in San Bernardino ten years ago--perhaps the only place in the world anymore where you can talk to yourself, not on a cell-phone--and probably the least Miltonian place on earth....
It's true, Milton can be daunting, and at times painfully dull and obscure. But then there are other times, when he reaches the height of lyrical beauty and expresses things better than anyone else. I continue to think that his depiction of the love story of Adam and Eve is the most perfect depiction of romantic love available. Adam speaking of Eve:
...when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in her self compleat, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say,
Seems wisest, vertuousest, discreetest, best;
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her
Looses discount'nanc't, and like folly shewes;
Authority and Reason on her waite,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally; and to consummate all,
Greatness of mind and nobleness thir seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard Angelic plac't.
His political works are also so much worth reading. I hope people still read Areopagitica, the loveliest defense of free expression ever published. His Second Defence of the English People is also magnificent:
Then, if you leave the church to its own government...and will no longer suffer two powers, so different as the civil and the ecclesiastical, to commit fornication together, and by their mutual and delusive aids in appearance to strengthen, but in reality to weaken and finally to subvert, each other; if you shall remove all power of persecution out of the church...you will then effectually have cast those money-changers out of the temple, who do not merely truckle with doves, but with the dove itself, with the Spirit of the Most High.
Then since there are often in a republic men who have the same itch for making a multiplicity of laws, as some poetasters have for making many verses; and since laws are usually worse in proportion as they are more numerous, if you shall not enact so many new laws as you abolish old, which do not operate so much as warnings against evil, as impediments in the way of good; and if you shall retain only those which are necessary, which do not confound the distinctions of good and evil, which, while they prevent the frauds of the wicked, do not prohibit the innocent freedoms of the good, which punish crimes, without interdicting those things which are lawful, only on account of the abuses to which they may occasionally be exposed. For the intention of laws is to check the commission of vice, but liberty is the best school of virtue, and affords the strongest encouragements to the practice.... Lastly, if you shall not dread to hear any truth, or any falsehood, whatever it may be, but if you shall least of all listen to those, who think that they can never be free, till the liberties of others depend on their caprice, and who attempt nothing with so much zeal and vehemence, as to fetter, not only the bodies but the minds of men, who labour to introduce into the state the worst of all tyrannies, the tyranny of their own depraved habits and pernicious opinions; you will always be dear to those who think not merely that their own sect or faction, but that all citizens of all descriptions should enjoy equal rights and equal laws.
Four centuries ago he said this! How sad that today's religious right know so little of the true and glorious history of Christian libertarianism.
