Who are 'the people' in Milton's writing? They figure prominently in his texts; they are invoked as the sovereign power in the state and have the right to overthrow tyrants; they are also, as God's chosen people, the guardians of the true Protestant path against those who would …
"William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique in…
"G.E. Bentley, Jr., the dean of Blake scholars, details the poet's occupations as a commercial engraver, print-seller, teacher, copperplate printer, painter, publisher, and vendor of his own books. In his early career as a commercial engraver, Blake was modestly prosperous, but …
"In the South Transept of Westminster Abbey in London, the bodies of more than seventy men and women, primarily writers, poets, and playwrights, are interred, with many more memorialized. From the time of the reburial of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1556, the space has become a sanctuary…
Percy Bysshe Shelley: poet and revolutionary
"This biography explores the foundation of Shelley's revolutionary politics--his anger at a system in which the rich lived luxuriously at the expense of the poor and oppressed, causing war, colonialism and suffering. An anti-monarchist and a forerunner of civil disobedience, his…