Milton's prose is probably most often approached from the perspective of its political content or its polemical skill. Much of it was written during the period 1641-60, when Milton contributed to the attack on episcopacy, opposed more conservative Puritans by redefining the relationship between church and state and by proposing changes to the law relating to the right to publish, and defended the English republic while justifying the execution of Charles I. Milton's mastery of the arts of persuasion makes a rewarding study in itself, and demonstrably the political values explicitly developed in the prose suffuse his major poems in pervasive and complex ways. Martin Dzelzainis offers an account of Milton's politics in chapter five; my principal concern is with Milton's style, though, as we shall see, issues of style cannot be separated from politics.

All of Milton's earliest vernacular prose, that is, his five antiprelatical tracts of 1641‒2, and some of his pamphlets of 1643‒5, including what is currently his most popular, Areopagitica (1644), are characterized by a flamboyant style, rich in imagery and lexically innovative to the point of playfulness. In it, metaphors and similes abound, often in great elaboration.