1. Life: Too much information? ; Character and early years, 1608-1638 ; Italy, 1638-1639 ; Poet and pamphleteer, 1639-1648 ; Government employee, 1649-1660 ; Life after the Restoration, 1660-1674
2. Contexts: Literary traditions and predecessors ; Literary contemporaries ; The book trade ; The civil wars ; Theology
3. Prose: Anti-prelatical tracts ; Divorce pamphlets ; Areopagitica (1644) ; Commonwealth prose
4. Poetry: "On the morning of Christ's nativity" (1629) ; L'allegro and Il penseroso (1631) ; A mask presented at Ludlow Castle (1634) ; Lycidas (1638) ; Sonnets (1629-1658) ; Poems (1645) ; Paradise lost (1667, 1674) ; Paradise regained (1671) ; Samson agonistes (1671)
