It would be difficult and indeed absurd to approach Milton's poetry without an awareness of his revolutionary commitment. One of the foremost polemicists against the bishops, the monarchy, and the rest of the baggage of the old order, he became Latin secretary to the republican Council of State and official propagandist of the new regime with his great Defences of the English people. After the Restoration his life was in danger, he was imprisoned and some of the books that he wrote were burned. Yet when we turn to his first book of Poems, the political, the revolutionary are not the immediate impression we receive. Certainly the volume includes early work dating from before the revolutionary years. Yet the collection was published in 1645, after the conclusion of the first phase of the Civil War and at a point when Milton had already published polemical and increasingly radical prose tracts - Of Reformation in England (1641), Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Areopagitica (1644).