04 - Milton by Thomas Babington Macaulay episode artwork

EPISODE · Aug 18, 2025 · 30 MIN

04 - Milton by Thomas Babington Macaulay

from Milton · host Thomas Babington Macaulay

John Milton (1608-1674) was an English poet, classicist, and a bold champion of civil liberty who played a significant role in the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He is perhaps best remembered for his monumental epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), a work that weaves together stunning imagery and profound themes of heresy. In this insightful essay, Macaulay merges literary critique with political history, asserting that Milton, unlike many of his contemporaries, rightfully earned the glory of the battle he fought for the most precious and least understood freedom of all—the freedom of the human mind. (Summary by Pamela Nagami, M.D.)

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04 - Milton by Thomas Babington Macaulay

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Bill Cooper Library Podcast Milton William Cooper "Read everything, listen to everybody, believe nothing, unless you can prove it with your own research.” Free To Choose Media Podcast Free To Choose Media The Free To Choose Media Podcast takes some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century and brings them right to your streaming device. Hear the ideas of Milton Friedman, along with several other Nobel Laureates, as they conduct speeches and hold conversations about the very freedoms we are still fighting for today. Come back each week to see why these truly are not just ideas for our time, but ideas for all time. Essential Scholars Fraser Institute Economist Rosemarie Fike explores the insights and lasting legacies of the world's greatest economists, thinkers and scholars, including: Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, John Locke, Elinor Ostrom, and many more. Learn about their most important ideas, which helped to shape the free and prosperous societies that many of us enjoy today. And discover why their insights are still relevant in today’s modern world. Visit www.essentialscholars.org to download books, explore our animated videos and more. Milton's Minor Poems by John Milton Loyal Books “On Shakespear 1630” typifies much of Milton’s poetry. By some miracle never yet explained, at age 24 he managed to get a 16-line encomium included in the Second Folio of the Bard’s collected works, 1632. Quite a coup! And this brand new M.A., never before published, used this brief poem to contradict Shakespeare’s chief rival, the great Ben Jonson, whose 80-line panegyric had graced the First Folio eleven years earlier. Jonson had said that Shakespeare’s monument was this living book, but Milton says, no, it is rather the readers who, stunned by the poet’s verse, become living statues in his honor.You will find the same audacity here in the minor poems as in Paradise Lost, which treats of “things unattempted yet in prose of rime.” You can hear it in the college student’s satirical invitation “Rivers arise . . . ,” a travesty of the epic catalogue of rivers; and in his affectionately irreverent epitaph on Hobson , the stage coach driver for the boys of Cambridge; and again in a secon

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