SOURCE: "Milton's Early Radicalism," in Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 7-27.

Wilding argues that Milton's democratic radicalism was present in his early work as well as his later writings.

How radical was the young Milton? Can we find evidence of a political commitment in the poetry associated with his Cambridge years? Is there anything in the early work that looks forward to the revolutionary?

Milton's Poems of 1645 has generally been seen as an unpolitical or apolitical volume, as embodying Milton's youthful poems of the age before the revolution. For those who find the image of Milton the revolutionary politically embarrassing, it is still possible to preserve Milton in the pantheon of great literary, figures, by focusing on this allegedly prepolitical gathering of the "minor poems." The "New Critical" reading of the 1645 volume offered in the commentary by Cleanth Brooks and John E...