SOURCE: Hill, Christopher. “George Wither and John Milton.” In English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of Her Seventieth Birthday, edited by John Carey, pp. 212-27. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1980.

In the following essay, Hill discusses the similarities between the political and religious views of Wither and Milton.

George Wither was born in 1588, John Milton in 1608. Wither published all his best poetry before he was thirty-seven. He continued to write incessantly for the remaining forty-two years of his life. Milton published his first book of verse at the age of thirty-seven, and already had a few prose pamphlets to his credit. He too wrote far more in bulk thereafter, much of it in Latin, all of it of incomparably higher quality than Wither's later writings.

Wither's sad deterioration is usually attributed to his vision of himself as an inspired prophet with a message for...