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Description of  Milton's Leveller God

Three and a half centuries after Paradise Lost and Paradise Regaind were written, do Miltons epic poems still resonate with contemporary concerns? In Miltons Leveller God, David Williams advances a progressive and democratic interpretation of Miltons epics to show they are more relevant than ever. Exploring two blind spots in the critical tradition the failure to read Miltons poetry as drama and to recognize his depictions of heavens political and social evolution Williams reads Miltons great argument as a rejection of social hierarchy and of patriarchal government that is more attuned to the radical political thought developed by the Levellers during the English Revolution. He traces echoes between Miltons texts and thousands of pages of Leveller writings that advocated for popular rule, extended suffrage, and religious tolerance, arguing that Miltons God is still the unacknowledged ground of popular sovereignty. Williams demonstrates that Miltons Leveller sympathies, expressed in his early prose, conflicted with his official duties for Oliver Cromwells government in the 1650s, but his association with the journalist Marchamont Nedham later freed him to imagine an egalitarian republic. In a work that connects the great epic poet in new ways to the politics of his time and our own, Miltons Leveller God shows how the political landscape of Miltons work fundamentally unsettles ancient hierarchies of soul and body, man and woman, reason and will, and ruler and ruled. Read more