Is John Milton a man for our time or all time? The blind and pugnacious, indeed, radical, English poet arguably wrote the greatest epic in the English language. While claiming to “justify the ways of God to men,” Milton’s remarkable poem is not only a window into the battles of early modern English civilization, it is a gateway into the mind of a prescient man who served as a precursor to the English Augustan age—an age that confronted the sterile mechanicalism and materialism of the emergent “Enlightenment” philosophy, an era duly remembered as the “Age of Passion.”

As part of my monthly literary column at TIC, I explore, explain, and defend John Milton’s erotic cosmos as crafted in Paradise Lost and how it serves as a precursor to the English Augustan Age of literature. Read it here: Milton’s Erotic Cosmos (2/1/2020).