The New England Milton concentrates on the poet's place in the writings of the Unitarians and the Trancendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, and demonstrates that his reception by both groups was a function of their response as members of the New England elite to older and broader socio-political tensions in Yankee culture as it underwent the process of modernization.