John Milton, born in London on 9 December 1608 and dead there on 8 November 1674, lived through one of the most violent and intellectually fertile passages in English history. He was a poet, polemicist, scholar, civil servant, religious controversialist, educator, translator, and theorist of political liberty. To many readers he is above all the author of Paradise Lost, the English epic that retells the rebellion of…
“I cannot praise a cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Hymn Writers, Metaphysical Poets, Political Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Spirituality, Wonder
Katherine Philips, born Katherine Fowler on 1 January 1632 and dead at only thirty-two on 22 June 1664, achieved a distinction that would have seemed improbable in the unsettled England of her youth: she became a celebrated poet while she was still alive, and she did so as a woman writing in forms and subjects conventionally claimed by men. Known to her readers and friends as “Orinda,” Philips fashioned poems of frie…
Neighbourhood:
LGBTQ+ Poets, Restoration Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder
