Poet of Revolution - Nicholas McDowell

In this podcast episode, the host interviews Professor Nicholas McDowell about his biography of John Milton, the famous English poet. McDowell discusses his approach to writing the biography and how he decided to split it into two volumes. He also talks about Milton's childhood and education, emphasizing the importance of understanding his development as both a poet and a political writer. McDowell explains that Milton grew up in a prosperous family and received an intensive education at St. Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge. He highlights Milton's linguistic abilities and his disappointment with the intellectual level of his fellow students at Cambridge. McDowell also discusses the influence of Milton's education on his later writings and his belief in the connection between culture, literature, and political and religious structures. Hello everyone, welcome to the Arctic Dog Podcast. I'm your host, Vasya Karmennikus. A couple of years ago I visited Milton's Cottage, which is the last surviving home of John Milton, one of the greatest English poets and author of Paradise Lost. I was just beginning to explore John Milton's life and wanted to learn more about him, so I asked the guide who took us on tour to recommend me a good biography of John Milton. The guide paused for several seconds, he rubbed his chin and said, to be honest, I cannot recall any good, well-written biographies of John Milton out there. I was disappointed to hear a reply like that, but several months ago I've discovered that Princeton University Press has published a biography called Poet of Revolution, the Making of John Milton, written by Professor Nicholas McDowell. I bought the book and absolutely loved it. It was so well-written and well-researched. I was very honored when Professor McDowell accepted my invitation to come to my podcast to tell more about writing the biography of John Milton. I believe that this episode will be interesting not only to those who admire John Milton and who have read Paradise Lost, but also for those who are curious and are poetry lovers. I hope you'll enjoy this episode, and let's begin. Hello, Professor McDowell. It's very nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking time and coming to my podcast. I know about your busy schedule. I've shared your book in my newsletter, and I received lots of messages back from my readers asking about you and thanking for sharing your great biography of Milton. For those listeners who might not know and might not have seen my recommendation, could you give a quick overview of what you do and what you specialize in? Yes, sure. So I'm a specialist in, I guess, 17th-century English literature. It's been my main focus in my research. And thanks for inviting me along, by the way, to talk about it. I'm always happy to do so. And the particular focus, I suppose, in my work has been on the mid-17th century and the English Revolution or English Civil War, some people call it. It's a controversial decision to call something a revolution or a civil war. We might get into that later. And so my specialist areas, in particularly that, I've been interested in the literary and cultural effects of political and religious division in 17th-century England. And Milton, John Milton, is the dominating literary figure of the 17th century, and he was also deeply involved in those religious and political conflicts. And so Milton really brings together my interests in poetry, literature, history, and, I guess, the development of historical change and conflict. I hold your biography of Milton 400 pages long and so well-researched and well-written. And one of the questions that the readers have sent in was, how do you approach kind of such a vast subject of writing a biography of personality? How do you choose your approach and how do you identify what has been researched before and what hasn't? And what's the process of writing a biography? Yeah, well, that's a very good question. And I'm delighted, of course, one of the things I was trying to do with this book is try to reach a wider audience. You know, it's a different type of book than the ones I've written before, which have been more, I suppose, conventionally scholarly. And although they've been biographically based, have been less presented as a biographical study. So one of the goals really was, indeed, to try and reach a better audience, a wider audience. And, you know, I think, it's true to say I had to think it took me a long time. I had to think very deeply about how to approach this book, because one of the particular issues is probably the case with writing a biography of anyone. But one of the particular issues with Milton is that he has been at the centre of the history of literary biography in English. So from the late 17th century onwards, people have been writing biographies of Milton. And indeed, in the Victorian period, there was a huge biography, multi-volume biography, by a guy called David Masson, which is considered one of the great literary biographies in English. There have been various biographies since then. In the mid-20th century, there was a two-volume biography by W.R. Parker. And in the 21st century, there have been two major biographies, one in the 2000s by Barbara Lewalski, a great Harvard scholar, who's now passed away, and in 2008, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth, there was another big biography by Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell. So, you know, I was really entering, I was very conscious of entering into a very crowded field, and also one that has quite high stakes in that people have quarrelled and debated the patterns of Milton's life, the developments of Milton's life. And those arguments have taken on a significance beyond, you know, simply the life of Milton. They've taken on significance about how we interpret what happened in the English Civil War, how we interpret the relationship between literature and history. You know, is a poet someone who stands apart from history? When a poet writes a poem, is that poem shaped by the historical forces that the writer is experiencing, or does the poem sit outside the history, and is it something that should be interpreted as just a kind of artifact in itself, outside the context which shaped it? So, absolutely, I mean, this biography was delayed a little bit by me really thinking very hard about how, you know, first of all, why should I write a new biography of Milton? Why do we need one, given that so much has been written on him? And secondly, you know, what was it that I felt was really distinctive about Milton as a historical figure? And I think in the end, you know, there's a more detailed answer, and I'll maybe come to that about, you know, why I thought I had to intervene in the history of Milton biography and have something new to say. But I also felt in the end that I think, you know, in the end, writing biography, I think it is about the biographer as much as the subject in many ways. And I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s in Belfast, right at the heart of the Troubles. And I was very affected by that. I mean, I left when I was 18 to go to university, and I was very pleased to leave at that point because it was quite, you know, I felt it had been quite a grim upbringing in many ways. But now, ever since then, I've sort of reflected on that experience, which is, you know, in some extent still ongoing, even though, you know, it's been peace for some time. And for me, actually going back to the English Civil War and trying to work out the fault lines that led to political religious conflict in the 17th century, which can be directly mapped on to what happened in Ireland in the 20th century. I mean, there's direct roots there from Oliver Cromwell's activities in Ireland, which are still, you know, remembered today in Ireland, and caused some of the political and religious fault lines that Northern Ireland's been dealing with. So I really, I came to with that sort of spirit that I wanted to explore how an individual grew up in an atmosphere of political religious conflict and how they express their feelings about that, in Milton's case, through wonderful poetry, as well as some very violent prose writing at times. But I wanted to also, you know, bring my own experience of growing up in a kind of low-level civil war to that, to writing about him. This volume is focusing on, let's call it, first half of Milton's life. It's till 1642. When you decided to make this biography in two volumes, how did you decide when to stop? Which is going to be the first volume and what we'll touch upon? How did you decide this division? It may not surprise you to know that I said I was originally commissioned by Princeton University Press. It should be said that originally it wasn't my original idea to actually write the biography. I was approached by Princeton University Press who said, would you like to do this? And that's when I spent probably a couple of years really thinking about how to actually write the biography before I started it. Although I had published quite a lot on Milton previously, obviously, and that's why they approached me. And you're right. So it started off as a one-volume biography. And I found a couple of years ago, as I got to sort of the 500-page mark of this first biography, that it was going to work out at about 1,000 pages. And that made me think that actually, to do justice to Milton's life and writings in the way that I felt I had to, I needed to have two volumes. And also from a, you know, I'll be honest, from a practical career point of view, you know, I wanted to publish one, a volume, you know, because otherwise it was, you know, it's quite a long period of working without actually publishing a book. And my publishers were very keen to see something come out. So that decision to split it into two was, in the end, a practical one taken, you know, towards the end of writing that first, what became the first volume. Originally, I was going to stop in 1649 with the first volume. I'd actually written up to 1649 and the execution of Charles I. So for those, some of your listeners may have some sense of the English Civil War, but it breaks out in 1642 in England, conflicts between Parliament and the royalist forces of King Charles I. And there are many reasons for the breaking out of that conflict, political and religious. But in 1649, Parliament eventually won the Civil War and decided to put Charles I on trial for essentially treason against his own nation. And he was publicly executed in January 1649, which to me is the most cataclysmic event, certainly of the 17th century, and probably one of the most cataclysmic events in British history. And England was a republic for 11 years, from 1649 to 1660. And Milton was a vociferous defender of the execution of Charles I. In my previous work, I'd done a new scholarly edition of his prose works defending the execution of Charles I. So originally, I've done a lot of work on that area. So originally, I was going to go up to 1649 and the execution. But as I developed the volume, I realized that 1642 was a good moment to stop with the outbreak of Civil War and the beginning of Milton's career as a prose writer. So in 1641-2, he starts writing and publishing polemical prose pamphlets as the Civil War breaks out, mainly writing against the Church of England at this point, not against the King. That comes later. It also is the point just before he gets married for the first time. And that, as some listeners may know, didn't end well initially for Milton, and his wife left him after six weeks. And he was driven by this experience to write a series of divorce, tracts on divorce, arguing that divorce should be granted on the grounds of incompatibility between a husband and wife, not simply on the grounds of adultery or non-consummation, which was the law in England at the time. And so I felt, you know, I felt that that marriage in 1643 represented a completely new development in Milton's personal life, and then the acceleration of the war from 1642 into more of a political conflict between Parliament and the King. So in the end, I decided to stop in 1642. The other reason, I suppose, is that I really want to connect in the second volume what Milton's best known for, which is Paradise Lost, this great epic poem, with the experience of the execution of Charles I and the culmination of the revolution. So the second volume will try to tie those events of the composition of Paradise Lost in the 1650s and early 1660s and the earlier experience he had of being a defender of the execution of a King, the significance of which historically I don't think can be exaggerated. Your biography mentions that Milton seen himself as a poet, he wanted to become poet like since a really young age. Can you tell a bit about a place that he grew up, what kind of family that he was from, and can you give kind of like the start, the beginning of when did he start consciously thinking of himself as a poet? So I spent quite a lot of time, I very much believe in Milton's case that going right back into his childhood and his education is actually key to understanding not only his development as a poet but also his development as a political writer because one of the things I'm trying to do in this biography is absolutely put the poet and the political writer together and to make sense. One of the reasons I decided to write this biography is that I felt most biographical accounts of Milton had in some way split the poet from the political and religious thinker and to me Milton's desire to be the great English poet is so intense from such an early age that it colours everything else that he does as well and so to split apart his poetic ambitions and his poetic achievements from his involvement in say defending the execution of Charles I or arguing that the Church of England is a corrupt institution, you simply can't separate those things. So that's partly why I go right back in quite some detail into his childhood and think about his experiences in institutions like school and university and try and think about how his education shaped not only his poetic ambitions but also his view of the world politically. So he was born, now it is important to point out with Milton, he is one of the reasons that he can write the way he does is that he is from quite a prosperous and rich family. His father was a successful businessman in London and Milton was quite comfortably off and it means in fact that in many ways he didn't really need to work during his life. He did work as a tutor, he enjoyed tutoring boys in the 1640s and of course he did work in the 1650s for the Republican and Cromwellian governments, the Republican governments of the 1650s and that's a key aspect but he chose to do that really, he didn't need the money. And he was very grateful for that so he wrote, there's a lovely poem in Latin that he writes to his father and a lot of his early poetry is in Latin which is the language of education in the 17th century and the language in which all boys, and it is only boys who go to grammar school and university in this period, all boys are brought up to speak and to write when they go to grammar school and university. And he's a lovely poem to his father in which he thanks his father for investing in his education and he talks about his father arranging, we know that Milton had personal tutors even before he went to St Paul's School in London, his father seems to have arranged for one particular tutor called Thomas Young to come and introduce Milton to Latin and Greek and maybe even a little bit of Hebrew. Milton from quite a young age in the 1620s is also writing in Italian, so he knows French and part of this comes from his school, he goes to school at St Paul's School as I say, but even before that he's quite learned and it's his father's wealth that allows that for private tutoring and he acknowledges that completely. So St Paul's School is one of the kind of founding Renaissance humanist institutions in England, founded in the early 16th century, very much along humanist principles and humanism in the Renaissance is an intense focus on language, literature, poetry, rhetoric, the art of speaking well, particularly in Latin, but it filters down into the vernacular and English as well, so he got a very intensive education there, way above any sort of education we would have today at a school. So when he left St Paul's School in 1625 he was fluent in Latin, pretty good Greek, some Hebrew, Italian, French, possibly other languages as well, but those are the main ones we know and he wrote in Italian, translated from Hebrew. So he went to Christ's College, Cambridge. So can I ask you, at what age did he graduate from St Paul's? You mentioned how many languages did he speak and intensive training, at what age did the students graduate at that time? It wasn't quite like today where you went to school at a certain age, you sort of chose when to go to school, but he left St Paul's at 16 to go to Cambridge. So by 16 he had quite an intensive education already. Which was, I mean, it wasn't entirely unusual in the period, but I think that's just the nature of education, it was something that happened at a much younger age, and it wasn't unusual for people to go to university at even 12 and 13 in that period. But nonetheless Milton was, I think, not surprisingly, an outstanding student, and I argue in the book that when he went to Cambridge he was actually quite disappointed by the level of his fellow students. I mean, we have some letters by him, we only really have the letters, personal letters, that he chose to preserve, which is interesting, you know, he's kind of shaping, he's always shaping his own biography in some ways, and that's a challenge for any biographer, Milton, because he himself presents you with the life that he wants you to see, and it can be hard to look beyond that. But he expressed his disappointment at the intellectual level of his fellow students, and he seems to have had a falling out with one of his tutors fairly early on at Cambridge. I argue in the book, and this was picked up, there was a piece on it in the Sunday Telegraph, actually, when the book was about to come out, I argue that he was actually whipped by one of his tutors, which was unusual at the time, although if you were under 18, as Milton was, it was still legal for your tutor to whip you in punishment. But the humiliation of this, and it would have been humiliating, seems to have led him to leave Cambridge and to say, you know, when he went back, he had a new tutor. The previous tutor, you know, it seems they just fell out irreconcilably with, and I suspect the reason he fell out with his tutor is simply because he thought he was cleverer than his tutors. There's some evidence that very, very clever grammar school boys like Milton did think that they were actually cleverer than their tutors, and in some cases they were, and I suspect that's what happened with Milton's first tutor. Other biographers have suggested it was a religious conflict, but I think for a 16-year-old boy, that's probably unlikely, and I think it was more to do with his own pride and belief in his learning. But yeah, and then at Cambridge, I mean, again, it would have been another intensive few years studying rhetoric, debating with other students in Latin. He really honed his abilities there as someone who could debate and argue, and you can see that in his polemical prose writings later in the 1640s, you know, what a kind of aggressive debater he is. A lot of his prose writing is kind of a personal attack on people who disagree with him, and that was something he was trained in at Cambridge at university in the period. He would have learned logic as well, and increasingly would have read widely in Greek as well, you know, after he'd really mastered Latin, he would have, you know, really pushed on into Greek literature as well. So, and he stayed on then for an MA at Cambridge as well, so he didn't leave Cambridge until 1632, and he spent seven years there. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that and thinking about the effects of that education, and one of the things about the education that Milton underwent is that there was a very strong correlation in humanist educational thought between the flourishing of a nation in terms of its culture and its literature and the political and religious structures of that nation. And so, obviously, humanists particularly look back to classical Rome and to ancient Greece, and, you know, there's a lot of discussion about whether a republic is the best form of political institution, and someone like Milton would have found in his reading at school and university a lot of arguments for, you know, the republican structures of government facilitate, you know, cultural flourishing, they facilitate greater liberty of speech, they facilitate eloquence, they facilitate a morality in the citizens, and certainly Milton was very influenced by that, and when it comes to defending the execution of Charles I and the establishment of a republic in England, he obviously looks back to the classical examples of Rome and Greece, and that's where he takes a lot of the material from. So, in a way, I see that education that he undergoes in the 1620s and 1630s as giving him a sort of arsenal that he can later use when he becomes a political writer, and, of course, it's all over his poetry as well. Paradise Lost is a form of classical epic about the Christian, or the story of the fall, the biblical story of the fall. So, yeah, it's crucial to understand Milton is to understand his firm belief in education, and the amazing education that he himself experienced. I hope you enjoyed listening to my interview with Professor McDowell, and before we continue, I wanted to tell you about my newsletter. Every month I send a newsletter with my favorite reads and favorite ideas. My aim is to build a community of people who are passionate about timeless ideas and are passionate about books. It is actually through that newsletter that this podcast came to be. I've shared Professor McDowell's brilliant biography in my newsletter, in one of the latest editions of my newsletter, and received many messages back asking me to tell more, and the best way to do that was to invite Professor McDowell himself to tell about John Milton and his biography. As I said, I was very honored when he accepted the invitation. If you are passionate about books and timeless ideas, please consider subscribing to my newsletter. I'll leave the link in the description of this episode, and I hope to meet you there. Do you think the fact that his father nourished so much his son in the beginning had such an impact on his independent thinking? Perhaps my second question, if I can, is that what were his political opinions when he was in Cambridge, and what were they like when he entered Cambridge? Obviously, he was very young, and the difference between the start and the end. Yeah, it's interesting. Milton never mentions his mother died in the 1630s. He doesn't really ever mention his mother, but his father, he writes this very fine Latin poem to, and he's clearly very grateful to his father, who, although a businessman, was also a musician as well of some accomplishment, and so introduced Milton to music as well, which is an important kind of theme throughout his writing. I think you're right, I mean, you know, there's no doubt that, although Milton underwent in some ways an education that was not unusual for a figure of his sort of background, I do think that the private tutoring that his father arranged was slightly unusual, even before Scope, and it's clearly his father, you know, as Milton himself used the metaphor of investing, the father invested his money in Milton, and Milton's promise was that he would deliver a payoff, but that payoff would be in the form of poetry, not in the form of material wealth, and of course, for Milton, you know, poetry is worth far more, but it's easy to say that, of course, when you're, you don't have to worry about rich, yeah, of course, you know, and there have been, you know, particular, I suppose, critics in Barber, Pearson, Paster have been more critical of Milton, perhaps, for that, you know, his, maybe his, you know, privilege that he, but I think he's aware of that privilege, and he's not someone who, and I think one of the things he finds when he goes to university is he's upset by seeing many students who went to university just for a couple of years, just to mess around, you know, they weren't interested in getting a degree, and the richer the family, or quite often, the more the student, the son, would just go to university as a kind of, you know, something to do for a couple of years, and then, you know, go and do something, you know, not as actually being invested in the education and the learning. I think Milton, you know, his personal letters, and some of the university exercises and debates that we have, that he himself published, you know, he's very proud of his performances in these university debates, which were in London, and he preserved the text of them. You know, he's quite, you know, he insults his fellow students, you know, he says, you know, we should be up, you know, look at the farmer out in the field, who's up, you know, at five o'clock in the morning and works all day till his back breaks, and you all sit around barely reading a book, you know, this is the kind of, you know, so he is, you know, he's very, he is, I think he is conscious of his privilege, but he's also fired by this obviously extraordinary, and highly unusual ambition to become a great English poet, to rival Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin, and become the great epic poet of his day. And one of the most extraordinary things about Milton is that he does have this firm belief from early in his life, and it's something that he does pay off, you know, he does deliver, he writes the great English epic in the form of Paradise Lost, not the poem that he originally thought he was going to write. He originally, you know, set out to write an epic about the Arthurian myths, he wanted to write an epic about British history, but in the end ended up writing about biblical history instead. But, you know, even as a student at university, he is presenting himself as the great English poet, he will become the great English poet, and it's a matter of how he will accomplish that. And one of the things I think he comes to believe, and this comes to your second question about political opinion, one of the things I think he comes to believe in the 1630s is that he will never write a great English poem, and other people will never accomplish great feats in England under a monarchy like that of Charles I. So there's been a lot of, you know, one of the things my biography argues is that Milton was never a radical from birth. So there was a big biography in the year 2000, the one I mentioned earlier by Barbara Lewalski, called The Life of John Milton, and she very much sort of saw him as a radical from the moment he popped out of the womb. Now he was just, he was a radical from childhood, and he became more and more radical. He was a Puritan, you know, a very zealous Protestant, she presented him as, and someone who then, whose republicanism emerged from that zealous Puritanism. I don't see Milton like that. I see Milton as someone who's quite a conformist in some ways in his youth, even though he has this very independent spirit. But at university, you know, he wants to succeed in all the conventional areas of writing Latin poetry, taking part in Latin faiths. There isn't much evidence of a very developed political consciousness when he's in his late teens, early twenties. He does write about the gunpowder plot and attack kind of the Pope and kind of Catholic plotting from the gunpowder plot of 1605. But that's very standard in the period, and that's not unusual. It doesn't signify any particularly radical views. What I do think, though, is as the political and religious situation worsened in England, as you go into the 1630s, Charles I is becoming increasingly authoritarian. He abolishes, basically abolishes the Parliament in 1629 and rules without a Parliament from 1629 to 1640. It's known as the personal rule of Charles I. So Parliament was denied a voice at that point and any kind of way of controlling the king's actions. And also Charles I in 1633, he makes a figure called William Laud, who figures quite a lot in my book, Archbishop of Canterbury. And Laud, along with other supporters of his, are very keen on introducing more ceremonial and ritualistic religion back into England. And that was seen by a lot of Protestants, particularly Puritans, as a kind of pseudo-Catholicism, a kind of return to Catholic doctrine. And Charles I was married to a French Catholic, Henrietta Maria, as well. And there was anxiety that she was exerting too much control over him. So as the nation starts in the 1630s to become more divided between king and Parliament, between those who support Charles and the Laudian faction and those who support a kind of more Puritanical faction, I think Milton then starts to think very hard about history and about the history of conflict, religious and political conflict. And he starts reading about Europe, European history, and what's happened in Europe. And he travels then in the mid-1630s, he travels to Italy and spends a year and a half in traveling around France and Italy. And again, for someone of his social status, not unusual to go on a kind of tour of Europe. But it seems for Milton that this was as much about observing how what he regarded as a tyrannical religious regime, i.e. the Catholic Church in Italy, had affected the culture of Italy. So he was a big fan of Dante, the great Italian epic writer, and he saw Dante as a model for his own poetic practice. But when he went to Italy, what he discovered, and he writes about this, is that he found a nation that he, from his point of view, had become weak, was no longer producing the great cultural and literary products that it had in the past. And he associated this weakness with the persecutory tyrannical structures of the Catholic Church, which he thought had damped down and suppressed learning and wit. And in his great work Areopagitica, in which he argues for the free circulation of ideas and for free speech, probably his best-known prose work today, very influential on thinkers in the American and French revolutions, there he actually talks about going to visit Galileo, who was under house arrest in Florence, under the Catholic Church, for his ideas about the earth revolving around the sun. And Galileo becomes a kind of personification for Milton of the way that certain governments and religious governments and structures can actually suppress and censor learning and intellectual achievement. And this, I think, really turns – he sees this happening in England. What he sees happening in England is the same, a kind of reversion back to tyrannical structures that he associates with the Catholic Church. And that really starts to radicalize him, I think. Various other things happen to him, but I think it's more of an intellectual conversion rather than something particularly personal, you know, that happens in his own life. And I think he sees the way that some of the people who are protesting against Charles I are – there are public tortures, you know, people are having their ears cut off and they're being branded for their attacks on the Church of England and on the monarchy. And he sees the beginnings of this kind of tyrannous persecutor regime, which will prevent England becoming the great nation that he envisages and will also, of course, prevent him, he feels, from writing his great epic poem. It's phenomenal to see the parallels between Dante and Milton, because Dante put all his opponents into hell in his poems. It's often forgotten that he was also a very political writer, you know. And just imagining Milton being in Italy and seeing the ancient ruins and the civilization that was back then, and seeing then the rule of Catholic Church and its oppression, I can imagine that there is this duality really might have affected him and radicalized. So, do you think, like, the radicalization, for the lack of a better word, is developed in him, actually, after his travels, after meeting Galileo and Hugo Grotius? Good question. Yeah, like you, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the term radicalization, especially since it means, you know, it means something, you know, today, you know, as well, and it has these connotations. And I try to sometimes put it in kind of inverted commas in the book. Other people have used it to describe Milton. I think it's certainly, I think it's a combination of reading. So, after he leaves Cambridge, he spends, and this, again, is an effect of the fact that he doesn't need to work, he spends another five, six years just reading, you know, privately. He leaves the university, but he continues to read, and he does write some of his better-known works in this period, as well, like his mask performed at Ludlow Castle, or Comus, as it's also known. And he also writes Lysidas in 1637, one of his greatest early poems. But he's also reading intensely, and in European history, and he's reading about politics, he's reading about, he's reading Dante, he's reading Boccaccio's Life of Dante. Brilliant. I mean, one of the things that I felt justified me writing this new biography was that even in the last few years, with the digitization of library catalogs, there have been quite a few interesting discoveries about Milton's books, books that he owned, and that he annotated. One of these discoveries a few years ago in the Bodleian Library in Oxford was of Milton's own copy of Boccaccio's Life of Dante, which Boccaccio talks about the censorship of Dante. And Boccaccio's own book had then been censored by the Catholic Church. So it's a kind of process of double censorship. And you can see Milton marking these passages in the 1630s, mid-1630s, as he's reading them. So to me, it was a kind of stunning, it's a stunning illustration of the way his reading is coinciding with the events that he sees happening around him in England, as the situation worsens, as they're heading into civil war. And then he goes abroad, and also, you know, I think that inspires him, reading things like Dante with Boccaccio, and Dante inspires him to go to Italy, where he, you know, he's, you know, he loves meeting, you know, it's not like he's, you know, his anti-Catholicism is an intellectual principle rather than something he personally, you know, holds against particular people. So he loves meeting lots of the members of the Catholic Church. He meets cardinals and so on, and enjoys talking to them, and continually tells us how much they enjoyed meeting him as well, and how much they enjoyed his poetry. So he's very proud of that. But I think he, from on an intellectual, from an issue of intellectual principle, I think what he finds in Italy, and Galileo becomes for me a kind of, you know, personification of that, is that decline, and that is crucial. Then when he comes back to England in 1639, you know, you're getting very close now. The war is starting to break out between England and Scotland at this point, and that's the anticipation of the civil war. And another thing I think was quite influential on him is his old tutor, who I mentioned earlier, Thomas Young, the tutor, the Scottish tutor who his father had hired to teach him, you know, way back when he was very young. Thomas Young himself becomes one of the most prominent early critics of the Church of England, and starts writing polemical attacks on the Church of England. And I argue in the book that, and Milton's first appearance as a polemical prose writer is anonymous, but he contributes an appendix to a publication that Young himself was involved in. So I actually argue that I think the fact that Milton saw people like Young, who he really respected, who had a big influence on him as a boy, and he saw people like that becoming radicalized, if you like, for want of a better word, and that also convinced him that this was the side he should join, this is the side he should be on. You mentioned several times the fact that he spent a lot of time reading, and I think in one of his friends said that he spends like till 12 midnight, he just simply sits and reads. I wonder what was he like as a friend, and what kind of friendships he forged in the first part of his life. Obviously, the famous friendship between him and Charles Diodati. What was Milton like in terms of friendship? What kind of friends did he have? What was his personality? One of the things I have tried to do in the biography is, because Milton, you know, I teach Milton every year, you know, I teach Milton every year to undergraduates at the University of Exeter. And some of them like him, but some of them are really intimidated by, you know, the kind of prophetic figure that he cuts by the time he writes Paradise Lost. And also the fact that his personality becomes, it's quite dominating in all his works, you know, you know, Milton is present in everything he writes in ways that other writers, for instance, Shakespeare, it's very hard to ever, you know, get a sense of Shakespeare's personality because he dissolves into all his characters. Whereas when you read Milton, you know, you always have feel the presence of Milton there, and some students feel very uncomfortable about that. One of the things I've tried to do in the biography is make him, is actually focus on his social life a bit more and say, you know, this, you know, you go back into his youth and you see his intense friendships with people, you know, school friends and friends at university, with someone like Thomas Young, his tutor, with Diodati that you've mentioned. And of course, you know, Diodati also died, like Edward King, a young, and Milton wrote a Latin elegy for Diodati in 1640. But in his letters, his correspondence, I guess you see, you see sort of, you know, glimpses of Milton's social life, which was very much, it must be said, he liked to be friends with people who were, not surprisingly, perhaps very serious about literature and about poetry, and about, you know, reading Latin and Greek and thinking about classical literature. And so he talks a lot about that in his letters. But also, you know, at university, he seems to have been sometimes argued that Milton was isolated and, you know, people didn't like him at university. But actually, that's not what I find at all. If anything, there seems to have been, he seems to be quite respected at university for his talents as a writer and debater, even though, you know, he insulted his fellow students quite a lot. I think they saw that as part of sometimes a kind of comic performance, whether it was or not is another matter. So, yeah, I mean, I think he was, I think he was a man of, who had intense friendships, but there were quite few friends. But the ones that he did, the friends he did have were carefully chosen. And those friendships were very important to him. At least up into the 1640s, where there's less evidence, we have less correspondence from that period, and we know less. And, you know, some of his friends have died as well. People tend to die young. In the 17th century, it wasn't so surprising. But I do think, yeah, I mean, I think rather than the kind of forbidding, prophetic, Old Testament type of figure that he's known as, I mean, of course, he goes blind in the early 1650s. And this, you know, in my first part of my biography, I don't cover that. But that's a key, key personal experience, going completely blind. But it also, he feeds that into the idea of him as a blind prophet, you know, someone who may be blind in his vision, but can see into the future. And before all of that, you know, he's quite a sociable person who I think, you know, enjoys the company of intelligent other people, men and women as well. So, yeah, that's one of the things I've tried to do in this biography, is to connect him up to social networks, if you like, and to see him as part of social groupings in ways that the later Milton, the kind of figure that he offers us when he comes to write Paradise Lost, looks much more isolated and alone. That was not always the case, by any means. Blindness is, of course, the second part of your biography. I've read somewhere that it is considered that Homer was blind, and he drew connections of that blindness for a poet is, you know, you don't see with eyes, but you see with the soul. One of the interesting parts, like, in your biographies, you mentioned this demonic part. I think you explained it better, what exactly is the demonic and how Milton saw that the role of the poet as he came back from his travels, and how did he see the role of the poet in the society? Well, I think so. Yeah, I mean, I do spend quite a lot of time, and I think this is something that's all through Milton's early work, is this notion, which he takes mainly from Greek philosophy, that a human being can turn themselves into a demonic creature, by which was meant a kind of being that was somehow between heaven and earth. You can sort of turn yourself into a more spiritual person through your own behavior on earth, and through that, you can somehow communicate with the heavens, with the divine, and communicate divine messages back to earth. Now, this may sound slightly, slightly, you know, strange, and it's not entirely, you know, it's not entirely clear to me in the book, and I do say this, that sometimes Milton seems to take this quite literally, and really believe it, and sometimes it's more a metaphor for what the poet does, how the poet looks to higher things, and turns themselves into a superior, if you like, being who has higher wisdom that can then teach others. But certainly Milton, I mean, it's everywhere. So Milton constantly thinks through imagery of rising up into the sky, and he constantly thinks about the poet as someone who kind of knocks on the door of heaven, and his revelation, you know, has knowledge revealed to him, and then the poet goes back down to earth, and through their poetry, they convey those divine truths to humanity. And I think he believed that through certain lifestyle choices, he could achieve something approaching a demonic status, and those lifestyle choices included incredible study, which we'd mentioned earlier, dedication to study. At one point, you know, when it comes to Paradise Lost, he presents his blindness as prophetic, like Homer, but earlier in his career, he also says, you know, I've lost my eyesight in reading, you know, I've read so intensely, you know, and dedicated myself to intellectual endeavor that that's why my eyesight is gone. So he has, you know, various arguments for those which might overlap. The other one is through physical self-control, including sexuality. So he, certainly up until the point, of course, he gets married, which I mentioned earlier in 1643, but prior to that, certainly prior to the early 1640s, he seems to really believe in the idea of virginity, preserving his virginity as partly a way to dedicate himself to the intellectual endeavor that will allow him to become demonic. And there is some evidence for this in Greek philosophy that he reads in Greek literature, the idea of, he read about, I think, Pythagoras, for instance, as someone who had, you know, lived a very frugal lifestyle, remained celibate, and through that had obtained higher wisdom. He also read about it in Boccaccio's life of Dante as well, that Dante was someone who had refused, you know, material comfort and had refused, or at least should have dedicated himself. Boccaccio thought that Dante had failed in some ways to dedicate himself to to sexual restraint. So there was some evidence for this in his reading, and he seems for a while, and if you read those early poems like Lysidas, he talks about Edward King. He says Edward King has gone to heaven. Edward King drawings in the RSC, as you mentioned, you know, Edward King in heaven is partly in heaven because he remained sexually virtuous throughout his young life. You know, so he's kind of obsessed with this idea that sexual restraint, and it seems virginity a lot of the time, is one way of dedicating himself to becoming this demonic figure who can, through great poetry, will communicate divine truths. Now, as I say, sometimes it's more literal and sometimes it's more metaphorical, and he seems sort of divided between whether it's a metaphor or whether it's really something he truly believes. But it continues right up to Paradise Lost, which famously, you know, opens with the poet invoking the muse to come and inspire him. And, you know, the poet of Paradise Lost talks about how the muse comes to him in the middle of the night and brings divine inspiration to him. So I think it's something that you can trace throughout his life, although he does then get married three times in the end. And I think that's huge. That's one of the reasons I wanted to stop the biography in 1642, because I think that decision to get married is actually quite a surprising one in terms of his previous life and the things that he'd said. And it's quite sudden. Everybody was surprised. His early biographers say everybody was shocked. He just went away and came back with a wife that nobody was expecting at all. And, of course, it didn't work out well initially in that she left him, although she did return to him and they were reasonably happily married until she died and he got married again. So that decision to get married is an interesting one. And it doesn't. It's quite a big decision, I think, for Milton to do that. I wonder what were the biggest obstacles for you when you were writing the biography? Well, I think if you go back, I mean, what you're saying at the beginning, I mean, I was very gratified to hear that, you know, some of your readers and listeners, you know, had enjoyed the kind of level of biographical detail and so on. And I think that was the real challenge was to, you know, Milton is probably the most learned poet in English, you know, in terms of his own. And we've talked about his education a lot. So, you know, in some ways, it's ambitious for someone that you might say foolhardy to try and then, you know, reconstruct that learning and education. So I felt one of the things I had to do, and I felt I really had to hold a lot of detail in my head at the same time. And, you know, somehow weave all of that detail into a narrative of the life that would be interesting and not just big concept detail, you know, to try and keep a narrative piece going. And then, you know, I didn't spend too long because, you know, people write whole books on small poems by Milton. And I know I try to do justice through sections of literary criticism. And I have two chapters on Lysadas, for instance, which I really try to make a kind of centerpiece of the book because I see it as the key moment where politics explicitly starts to become part of Milton's poetic life. But at the same time, I was aware, you know, in a biographical narrative, even in intellectual biography, as I style this one, one has to keep moving. It's a linear movement. And so I think that was the thing I found hardest, was to balance the demands of a biographical narrative that would satisfy and entertain readers with the level of kind of literary critical historical detail that I felt was necessary to really do justice to the complexity of Milton. How did your, like, opinion of Milton change while you were writing the biography? Was it any different from the start when you finished it? I think what I found was, you know, going back to what we were saying earlier, is that he was a happier person than, especially in the early part of his life, perhaps up to the point of going blind, which I think is obviously a traumatic experience. But he was quite a happy and well-adjusted individual in his youth. Very happy family life, you know, as they loved his father, you know, very grateful to his father, seems to have gone on well with his brother, Christopher, who supported the royalist side in the Civil War. Had these friends, these good friendships, had fallings out with people like his tutor, but also they had these firm relationships. So I think I found, I was pleased to sort of, despite the fact that his ambition to become demonic may make him sound a bit sort of supernatural in some ways, and there is that aspect to Milton, and the extraordinary fact that he does deliver on the promise that he makes in his youth to write this great epic. And the fact that, you know, he becomes almost like this prophetic figure. I think I was gratified to find that I could find a figure in there who was more human and who, you know, you could explain how he became the way he became. And he wasn't just born as this epic poet, you know, the way he sometimes presented that you can see the way that he developed and his ideas developed. You could see the books that he read and how that shaped the person he became. And so, you know, I think that, I think I find him a happier, a happier person than I'd expected. And also someone, gratifyingly, who, for all his learning, did take shortcuts, you know, and didn't, you know, sometimes presented himself as more learned than he really was. And despite, obviously, you know, vast degrees of learning. But there were other people, he understood that there were other people in the period who knew more than he did. And he was trying to be like them. You know, so he was, he has an element, for all his egotism, there was an element of modesty, he recognized that he was always trying to work towards a level of knowledge that he was, maybe would never obtain, but he could see that other people did obtain that. And, you know, his admiration for someone like Shakespeare, you know, it's one of the great discoveries, as I just finished the book, I say this in the introduction, as I finished the first volume, there was this amazing discovery of Milton's, what seems to be Milton's copy of Shakespeare's first volume, with some annotations. And although the annotations themselves are not vastly interesting, what I think it did do is really emphasize how much Milton admired other writers, Shakespeare among them. And, you know, I think that I enjoy that sort of aspect of him, you know, that he, for all his egotism, again, he admired, and he could see other, the qualities of other writers, and how he could try and, you know, what he needed to do to try and live up to their level. I wanted to say that a couple of years ago, I visited his house in Chelmsford St. Giles, and I mentioned this when I recommended your book in my newsletter. I asked the guide there, who took us through the rooms where Milton lived, I asked him if there is a good biography out there of Milton, because I wanted to learn more. And he, like, just paused for a couple of seconds, and he says that, you know, all of the biographies, if you are interested in very academic biographies, yes, there are some, but, like, the ones that are very well researched, combined the academism and the very fluent style, there isn't one that I can recommend to you. I was very glad, after two years, to find your biography, which made Milton human and comprehensible in terms of his intellectual development. I wanted to ask you, when is your next volume of your biographies coming out? Any plans, any future projects, anything that you would like to share? Well, certainly, very much. So, as I said earlier, I'd already written, up to 1649, anyway, before I started, I decided to stop the first volume in 1642. So, I'm very hopeful that the second volume is contracted for September 2022, so coming out at the end of 2023. So, I would hope that it will be out by the end of 2023, maybe 2024 at the latest. And that's really going to, yeah, that's going to occupy me mostly for the next few years, I think. I'd really like to get it finished because what's gratified me, actually, by the reception of Poet of Revolution is I was quite concerned that, you know, publishing one volume would upset, you know, it's not what people wanted. They wanted, like, the full thing right up to Paradise Lost, the full life. But I've been quite gratified so far, at least, by the reviews and reception that, you know, they're looking forward to the second volume, and they can, readers have seen that the point of stopping one volume, it isn't just arbitrary, that there are reasons for stopping in 1642, even though I said I had originally to write one volume. And I think that having the second volume will really allow me to do justice to Paradise Lost, for instance, which otherwise, the risk in a biography, you know, you're trying to get everything in the whole life into, you know, small spaces that Paradise Lost, which is Milton's supreme achievement, sort of gets lost, you know, sort of gets put to the side. So I really, in that volume, I think what I'm going to be really concentrating over the next year or so is really fitting Paradise Lost into my biographical narrative in a satisfying way, comprehensible way, while still doing justice to the literary qualities of Paradise Lost. As you mentioned, like, there are books dedicated to just separate poems by Milton, and I had dozens of other questions, we didn't touch upon, like, Lysides and Comus a lot, but like, I would like to thank you a lot for your time. I really enjoyed your biography, and from the messages that I got back, it seems like many other people have enjoyed reading it, and I really, really cannot wait for the second volume, obviously, because it touches on Paradise Lost, what Milton is also famous for. Thank you so much for coming, Professor McDowell. Thank you very much, really enjoyed it. Some great questions. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode with Professor McDowell. You can find all about his latest book on John Milton by clicking on the link in the description of this episode. You can also receive updates about the new episodes of this podcast by subscribing to our mailing list. I'll leave the sign-up link also in the description of this episode, and I'm really looking forward to meeting you there.