For a stagnating left mired in pessimism, Milton’s radical vision is poetry in motion

John Milton’s poetry became the inspiration for a radical movement that felt defeated in the aftermath of the restoration in 1660. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

‘Is this pessimism?”, TJ Clark asks in his 2012 essay For a Left with No Future. “Well, yes.” How else, he wonders, “are we meant to understand the arrival of real ruin in the order of global finance… and the almost complete failure of left responses to it to resonate beyond the ranks of the faithful?”

Published originally in the New Left Review, the essay is part of Those Passions, a new collection of Clark’s work. Clark is not a political theorist but a historian of art. A Marxist, much of his work explores the interface of art and politics with considerable nuance and depth, illuminating artists from Bosch to Pollock, Rembrandt to Lowry.