The good old cause: John Milton's Areopagitica revisited.(Literature)

Idle expens was spar 'd, for guests were none, No drunken riot, verses fescennine, Or antic dancing marr 'd the awful day. In conscious rectitude the Bridegroom smil 'd Upon his Consort with superior love, And pass 'd the hours til night in discourse high To justifie to her the wayes of Man.

--from James McAuley's "A Wedding Piece", as John Milton might have handled the union of St George (England) and Una (the Church of England) in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene

JAMES MCAULEY thought Wordsworth got it wrong when he wrote:

Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen etc.

For McAuley the only use to be made of the political Milton is to exemplify the public nuisance literary ideologues make of themselves. Milton the poet is to be ranked with Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare. But Milton the revolutionary was destructive, ignorant and arrogant. McAuley would have amended Wordsworth's sonnet to read: Dryden/Thou shouldst be living at this hour ...

McAuley's anger with Milton is partly that of a reformed Miltonist. From the anarchism of his youth to the apocalyptic Catholicism of later years, McAuley always found it hard to resist the lure of revolutionism. In denouncing Milton, he was renouncing something of himself: Captain Quiros was his Paradise Lost. (He was also, incidentally, condemning the violence of the New Left in the 1970s.)

Conservatives generally support McAuley. In the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson was also repelled by Milton's arrogance (his "pride disdainful of superiority") and his destructiveness ("his predominate desire to destroy rather than establish"). In the twentieth century Willmoore Kendall considered him "the soul of intolerance" and A.L. Rowse found "a very nasty spirit" in the religious-patriotic exaltation of the Areopagitica.