Type: Exhibition catalog

Name: John Milton and the Cultures of Print: An Exhibition of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Artifacts

Detail: Published by Rutgers University Libraries in conjunction with the exhibition opening.

Type: Exhibition section

Name: IX. The Restoration: Censorship and Paradise Lost

Detail: THE RESTORATION -- CENSORSHIP AND PARADISE LOST: Paradise Lost (1667) was Milton’s first venture into print after the Royal Proclamation, his arrest, and the public burning of his works in 1660. In order to reenter the public world of print, Milton returned to a family business that had published several political tracts – including Eikonoklastes, one of the banned books. Still, as one early biographer relates, censorship threatened to suppress publication: “we had like to be eternally depriv’d of this Treasure by the Ignorance or Malace of the Licenser, who, among other frivolous Exceptions, would needs suppress the whole Poem for imaginary Treason in the following lines: As when the Sun new ris’n / Looks through the Horizontal misty Air / Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon / In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds / On half the Nations, and with fear of change / Perplexes Monarchs.” (Paradise Lost, I, 594-9) We do not know what other “Exceptions” were taken or allowed, but Milton’s manuscripts continued to be challenged by licenser.

Type: Exhibition caption

Name: Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Ten Books (Printed by S. Simmons, and are to be sold by T. Helder at the Angel in Little Brittain, 1669)

Detail: Milton's Paradise Lost appeared first in 1667, and it was reissued in the following year with a polemical "Note on the Verse," which was written in response to readers who demanded to know why the epic was written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). The printer, Samuel Simmons, son of the printer who had printed his radical polemical tracts, was unable to sell all the copies of the original print run, so he repackaged the epic with an explanatory note.