Matthew C. Augustine

That Slumbring Leviathan: Milton in the Restoration

 not very long ago, one could justifiably observe (or indeed complain of) the tendency among scholars of Milton to cordon the poet from his Restoration contexts, to imagine him a kind of Renaissance leviathan, “beached on the shores of an alien culture, writing poetry that casts into doubt the very premise of Stuart Court culture.”1 Where students of Milton did make inroads into the Restoration, it was most often under the auspices of “the literary culture of nonconformity,” as N. H. Keeble has influentially termed that congeries of godly writers formed, as he saw it, by