Colin Burrow writes:

Traditionally the poets of the mid-17th century were believed to stand outside and above Nedham’s kind of politics. But by the summer of 1650 Andrew Marvell was writing works that showed equivocal enthusiasm for the Cromwellian regime, and by 1654 – not without some apparent wobbles back to the royalist cause – he was composing panegyrics to Cromwell’s government. Milton, meanwhile, having set aside his early fantasy of being a poet ‘soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him’, was by 1649 employed by the Council of State as secretary for foreign tongues, writing long, considered Latin treatises (often misleadingly called ‘pamphlets’) which justified the execution of the king to a European audience. From 1651-52 Milton acted as licenser for Mercurius Politicus – this was the period in which he was finally losing his sight, though we can’t just blame Nedham’s copious quill for his blindness – and from 1650, Blair Worden argues, had been collaborating in one way or another with his apparently unprincipled friend.

(LRB 19 June 2008)

Oxford | hardback 458 pp. |ISBN: 9780199230815