About John Milton’s prose writings, it may be said that uncompromising directness and passionate vehemence characterize all these documents. His avowed object had been, he says, “to write plainly and roundly,” for he has resolved “to vindicate to spotless truth from an ignominious bondage whose native worth is now become of such low esteem that she is like to find small credit with us for what she can say.”
His method is discursive and speculative, and he certainly adopts a larger point of view that before.
Another interesting feature is the extraordinary display in the pamphlets of Milton’s passion for Independence. He feels far too strongly to write and reason temperately: fierce and bitter denunciation, tempestuous personalities are hurled against, his opponents. That acute sense of the righteousness of his own cause, which has always characterized the Puritan and made of him, so merciless an opponent, animates Milton’s political writings.
It was the aspiration for a cleaner, jester, sweeter world that fed the fire of his passion for liberty. Behind the violent, scurrilous pamphleteer was the idealist. Always is he on the side of liberty, whether it is religious or civil.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Books contain Potency of Life: Books he says were things of which a Commonwealth ought to take no less vigilant charge than of their living subjects. “For books do contain a potency of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are… As good almost kill a man sail a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys good book kills reason itself.