The complete online text of Areopagitica by John Milton.

John Milton's career as a writer of prose and poetry spans three distinct eras: Stuart England; the Civil War (1642-1648) and Interregnum, including the Commonwealth (1649-1653) and Protectorate (1654-1660); and the Restoration. When Elizabeth I, the so-...

John Milton's career as a writer of prose and poetry spans three distinct eras: Stuart England; the Civil War (1642-1648) and Interregnum, including the Commonwealth (1649-1653) and Protectorate (1654-1660); and the Restoration. When Elizabeth I, the so-...

John Milton's claim to continued recollection rests primarily, of course, on his preeminence as a poet. In 1642 he said that he had been forced by a sense of political duty to interrupt his efforts to become "a Poet soaring in the high region of his fanc...

It is the willful disregard of history that is the object of critique in the pages that follow. (Fish, No Such Thing ix) MODERN scholarship of Milton's Areopagitica is understandably perplexed on some points. The tone of Milton's panegyric on freedom of speech...

It is the willful disregard of history that is the object of critique in the pages that follow. (Fish, No Such Thing ix) MODERN scholarship of Milton's Areopagitica is understandably perplexed on some points. The tone of Milton's panegyric on freedom...