"Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour / England hath need of thee," wrote Wordsworth. For an hour on Saturday morning, England may not have heard Milton's soaring voice but this corner of Wales did. We heard a thrilling account of his remarkable life by biographer Anna Beer that made a powerful case for reinstating him at the heart of the canon.
Poor Milton. He was de rigueur when I was studying Eng Lit at school and I remember plodding pointlessly through Comus and dipping into Paradise Lost, which felt like purgatory. The problem, of course, is that this is a voice that needs time and contextualisation - two things in short supply on the exam treadmill.
What was brilliant about Beer's rendering was her integration of the life and the work: how Milton's multiple losses - of friends, wives, the Cromwellian government he had supported, status, liberty and his sight - fed into his writing, producing the many layers of Paradise Lost, which was at once biblical exegesis, political satire and a personal statement of faith.
TS Eliot complained that there was too much context in Milton: the poetry, enlisted in the political and religious battles raging in the middle of the 17th century, could barely breathe. Clearly, there are huge problems for us as readers in understanding the coded political messages and absorbing the wealth of classical and biblical allusion.
Beer made a joke about this when she read his sonnet in memory of his wife: "Methought I saw my late espoused saint / Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, / Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, / Rescued from Death by force, though pale and faint." Literary scholars producing editions of the poems loved their footnotability, she said, while the rest of us held our heads in anguish. Already by the second line, we need a working knowledge of Greek mythology to untangle the poem.
But Beer succeeded in making us feel that exploration was worthwhile. Her Milton, like Wordsworth's, is a living, urgent voice. She read that sonnet, she told us, because she wanted to highlight the final line, in its simplicity and humanity: "I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."
"In simple monosyllables," she writes in the biography, "the agony of bereavement is expressed, all the more starkly in contrast with the convoluted syntax of the previous 13 lines ... The pain of his bereavement and the experience of blindness are fused in that one desolate line. Consolation is fantasy. Consciousness is darkness."
Milton, Beer said, wanted to create "fit readers" who wouldn't fall in with "gross conforming stupidity". How he would have hated reality TV, she said in an aside. But at the same time as stressing the ambition of his writing - his famous desire to "justify the ways of God to men" - she humanised him, made us feel that beneath the superstructure of biblical and classical learning was an essence that spoke to us still.
When Beer's book was published, some reviewers lamented that in the year that marks the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth we were not making a bigger fuss of a writer who could claim to be our national poet. Perhaps he has been damaged by the charges of Eliot and others. But it is not too late: his birthday does not fall until December, and there were enough well-wishers at Beer's talk - including two young women in front of me nodding with pleasure as she read from poems they recognised - to suggest that the celebrations may yet be vigorous.
"Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea," eulogised Wordsworth. With Beer's help, the Miltonic tide may be coming back in.
