Temptations in the Wilderness: Freedom and Tyranny in Peter Ackroyd's Milton in America

Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns are merely two of the most recent defenders of the idea that “in intellectual terms, Milton is one of the founding fathers of America.”1 Here they are speaking — like George Sensabaugh, Lydia Dittler Schulman, and R. P. Van Anglen before them — of Milton’s obvious influence on the republicanism of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams.2 The adjective “intellectual” in their introductory prepositional phrase is crucial, however, for it registers simultaneously the authors’ agreement with what has become a commonplace in writings on John Milton and America, and qualifies the broader implications of the main clause. Campbell and Corns go on, after all, to assert that Milton is not our contemporary: “He was certainly no democrat,” they remind us, nor