“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645ceived his sexual and marital experiences. He wrote nothing so charged with un-
conscious self-revelation as his passionate descriptions of loneliness, courtship, and
incompatible wives, and of the wife he wanted but did not get. He wrote almost no
poetry in these years: only three sonnets, so far as we know. Nor did he, as before,
construct himself as a poet turned polemicist, promising himself and his readers that
he would soon write poetry again. That may be, as Ernest Sirluck argues, because
his painful marital mistake led him to question his God-given vocation,^1 or he may
simply have found himself distracted from high creativity by emotional angst. He
describes the pain of loneliness, disappointment, and despair so feelingly that he
must have experienced it acutely.
As he did in the antiprelatical tracts, Milton again sees and presents himself as a
scholarly author, but he now defines that role more complexly. He is less willing
than before to cite authorities in support of his arguments, lest he undermine his
own autonomy, authority, and originality. He had, it seems, a visceral distate for
seeming to peddle others’ ideas like a pedant or a second-rate thinker. He put his
name to most of his tracts of this period, proudly proclaiming his “willingness to
avouch what might be question’d”;^2 he also approved the law requiring identifica-
tion of author and printer as a means of securing authors’ rights (CPW II, 491). As
mechanisms of control fell into disuse with the war, he embraced the new openness
of the print marketplace and celebrated, in Areopagitica, the free circulation of ideas
it was promoting. He portrays his authorial role as involving many others: coura-
geous romance hero uncovering lost truth, public benefactor, citizen–adviser to the
parliament in the mold of Cicero and other classical orators, and prophet – though
not now, as in Of Reformation and Animadversions, in the apocalyptic or bardic mode.
If he does not now write about becoming a poet, he does write – especially in
Areopagitica – dense, figurative, sometimes sublimely poetic prose.
This period was a radicalizing stage in the evolution of Milton’s political and
theological ideas. In the antiprelatical tracts he distanced himself from his Presbyte-
rian associates, but in these tracts he wholly severs his bond with them by his views
on divorce and toleration and by his attacks on literalistic biblical exegesis.^3 Also, he
now conceives the Mosaic Law in very different terms. In the antiprelatical tracts he
emphasized its servility: as a law of bondage abrogated for Christians by the gospel
covenant of grace it could afford no ground for prelates to look to the Jewish high
priests as a precedent for their office. Here, he emphasizes the perfection of the Law
and the enduring validity for Christians of all those parts of it that incorporate the
moral laws of nature – including the divorce law of Deuteronomy 24:1. At this
period Milton still accepts predestination, but his insistence that God binds himself
“like a just lawgiver to his own prescriptions” (CPW II, 292–3), and his emphasis
on responsible human choice as the essence of virtue and as a force for historical
change, show him well on his way to an Arminian position on free will.^4 He is also,
as Stephen Fallon notes, well on his way to his later monism when he insists, as no
other contemporary marriage theorists did, that a union of minds is essential to a