‘After Shakespeare and Chaucer’, Bloom asserts, ‘John Milton is the most eminent poet in the English language’, which would make him the most eminent of the Parkleys Poets.
Milton was born in the house at the sign of the Spread Eagle, Bread Street, and attended St Paul’s School from around the age of twelve. He went to Christ’s College, Cambridge early in 1625, and after that lived in Hammersmith, then Horton.
Poetry notwithstanding, for much of his career Milton was a writer of prose polemics, his Areopagitica (1644), written during the Civil War, being one of the great arguments against censorship: ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’
Like Spenser, his ‘master’ and ‘original’, Milton saw his poetic role as a national one. But, unlike the royalist Spenser, from the Restoration in 1660 Milton the republican did not get to live in an England of his choosing. Perhaps this influenced him in eschewing the Arthurian and, in Paradise Lost, widely considered the greatest English poem, attempting to ‘justify the ways of God to men’.
The poem begins with Satan, who Coleridge said possesses ‘a singularity of daring’ and Shelley ‘energy and magnificence’. But it ends with Adam and Eve, all too human, paradise having been lost:
They looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat […] Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and providence their guide: They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way. (XII. 641–49)
Is paradise regained to be found in the vicinity of Milton Court? Perhaps, according to one former resident of Ham – a saint no less – who said ‘I dreamed about it when a schoolboy as if it were paradise.’1
John Henry Newman (1801–90) who spent some of his childhood at Grey Court House.