John Milton (1608-1674) is considered the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. He lived during the turbulent years of the Civil War, and held a bureaucratic post under the commonwealth. When the English monarchy was restored, he retired and wrote his larger masterworks, including Paradise Lost.

He wrote no hymns as such; this was before Isaac Watts, and neither Puritans nor Anglicans were singing hymns yet. Except for a combination of several psalms and a hymn or two extracted from his larger poetic works, this is his only work in current use as a hymn.

He apparently made several abortive attempts to create a complete metric psalter, eventually publishing 19 psalm versions.¹ Perhaps his poetic ideals clashed with his Calvinist concept of metrical psalm (compare the ideals of the Scottish Psalter, created during his lifetime.) Some of his versions are in stanza formats completely unsuited for singing; others are rigidly literal -- even to the point of indicating interpolated words in italics, as in the King James Version. This youthful effort, however, is justly in wide use.

In the late nineteenth century, the per mid-twentieth century, Musicologists, led by George Pullen Jackson, began giving the American folk hymn tradition the same careful study (and resultant exp

This combination is from the 1966 (Congregationalist) Pilgrim Hymnal, and is characteristic of the general revival of classic American folk hymn tunes in that decade.

of Lowell Mason, largely missed on this trend: out

Use:

Notes

¹Psalms of John Milton, available online.

²".

^fCompare the similar revival of "Resignation" and "Wedlock". Another effect of this revival was the cessation of ill-conceived attempts (based on misplaced elitism) to replace the magnificent "Foundation" (How firm a foundation) with the light and cheery "Adeste Fidelis" (O come, all ye faithful). Our hymnal editors, busily promoting their own copyrighted imitations of Lowell Mason's followers or of tent-meeting evangelistic solos and choruses, ignored that trend: only in Great Songs of the Church, Revised are we beginning to see any influence from that work.

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