John Milton, who was born in London 400 years ago next week, was the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. This Milton anniversary year has of course been richly marked by lectures, discussions and exhibitions. The BBC - as national broadcaster - will rightly commemorate Milton this month with an extensive range of programmes on Radio 3, including a complete reading of Paradise Lost starting on December 22. All honour to all these efforts.
Yet amid all this there is a sense that we are losing Milton. His work is no longer regularly taught in state schools or even in all university English departments. The shared grasp of Milton's achievement, his cosmos of rebellious angels and its seductive Satan, which could generally be assumed among literate people of all classes in the past - Darwin always carried Paradise Lost with him - is slipping away. Writers from Blake to Philip Pullman may revere Milton, but his anniversary has gone unmarked by the Department of Culture. No government minister has made a speech about him. There has not even been a special postage stamp.
Milton's stature remains too great for him to disappear entirely. Yet unless we make a conscious effort to reclaim Milton, we are at risk of losing him - or of consigning him, like the study of German or Arabic, only to the privately or Oxbridge-educated elite. If that happens - and it will do so unless we stop it - an irreplaceable understanding of who we are as an English-speaking nation and what we have a responsibility to pass on will be lost.
The most important collective reminder must be of Milton's importance as a poet and writer. Rowan Williams put it well in his sermon on Milton in September. Milton "believed profoundly in words", said the archbishop. "He worked out of a pervasive confidence that his language could sound the depths of truth and communicate them in such a way as to change human hearts." Milton's language can be simple or complicated, direct or allusive, seductive or severe. In all its modes, though, it has a communicative fervour. There is a deep sense in which Milton fashioned the English we have inherited. If that language is our greatest gift to the world then Milton is the vessel through whom it flowed most majestically.
In his lifetime Milton deployed it in the service of many public causes: for education, freedom of the press, open debate, religious toleration, divorce reform, republicanism and regicide. For nearly 20 years he largely abandoned poetry for politics (though he wrote some of his greatest sonnets at this time). Inevitably he argued these causes with the assumptions of his era - his male-centred view of education and divorce or his anti-Catholic view of tolerance are not ours. Milton was no democrat, yet he is the fountainhead of our always threatened culture of democratic reasoning. A new essay by David Marquand in Political Quarterly argues that Milton shaped three great themes of English popular politics: republican self-respect as opposed to monarchical servility, engaged civic activity versus slothful private apathy, and government by challenge and discussion rather than deference or conformism. Do we live up to those traditions today as well as we could or should? Wordsworth got it right: "Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour. England hath need of thee."
England and Britain still need Milton today. We need what he wrote and what he imagined. "Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest," wrote Thomas Gray in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, one of the few 18th-century poems which many people still know. It would never have occurred to Gray that even Milton himself might one day lie almost mute and inglorious. Readers of Milton may never again be as thick as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa. But the world is still all before us, almost as it was for Adam and Eve, and we still need Milton as we in turn make our own way through it.