John Milton, Poet and Humanist: Essays - Hardcover

Hanford, James Holly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0829500502 ISBN 13: 9780829500509

Publisher: The Press of Western Reserve University, 1966

Synopsis

These seminal essays on Milton are collected and reprinted because they represent a turning point and a landmark in Milton scholarship. Professor Hanford was one of the few scholars at the beginning of the twentieth-century who rescued Milton from the narrowness of the Puritan tradition, from the limitations of eighteenth-century Reason, and from nineteenth-century Romanticism. Through him, Milton became what he always intrinsically had been, a high soul responding to the classics and heir and partaker of the intellectual and emotional richness of the Renaissance, as well as a Puritan and defender of freedom by 'deeds above heroic.'

Although a Puritan, Milton was a Christian Humanist in both his method and his aim. Thus Professor Hanford reasserts Milton's relevance to the twentieth-century in essays that are models of scholarship, shedding new light on Milton as poet and as man.

James Holly Hanford (1882-1969) was professor of English at Western Reserve University; he previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served as president of the Modern Language Association of America. The Milton Society of American gives an annual book prize to honor a particularly distinguished new volume in the field of Milton Studies in Professor Hanford's memory. Frontispiece: Black-and-white portrait of Professor Hanford.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Press of Western Reserve University
• Publication date: 1966
• ISBN 10: 0829500502
• ISBN 13: 9780829500509
• Binding: Hardcover