[1] The resistance was led by the Greek Communist Party, which he viewed as a danger to the freedom of post-War Greece; later he identified himself as "a firm anti-Communist".
The fundamental principle of Milton's thought is lucidly stated: 'No man who knows ought, can be so stupid as to deny that all men naturally are born free'.He remained a faithful member of the Greek Orthodox Church; in later years, he would come to forgive his students of the 1960s and 1970s for "their ignorance, their radical politics, and their atheism.
"[5] He studied with John Crowe Ransom and Charles M. Coffin at the English Department of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
[8] At Kenyon, under the supervision of James Holly Hanford, he wrote his senior thesis on Milton's place in the Christian tradition, beginning the central research project of his next fifteen years.
[9] His 1963 absence left no teacher for the graduate course on John Milton's literature, until a young Middle English specialist, Stanley Fish, volunteered to cover Patrides's course.
[12] George Bornstein, a scholar of 19th and 20th-century poetry, noted in 1986 that "Patrides produced numerous pioneering books and articles which remain standard texts.
Both prefaces noted his aim "to avoid the impertinence of mere paraphrases" while providing essential contextual information to aid the contemporary reader.
[19][20] Despite his prodigious knowledge of literature and of religious history, Patrides eschewed elaborate annotations that would distract readers from the text itself.
Restrained annotation allowed readers to experience the semantic harmonics of Metaphysical poetry and of Milton, the most allusive writer of the English Renaissance.
[12] In the judgment of Summers and Pebworth, "Patrides's Olympian style remains distinctive, characterized not only by its mannered elegance of phrasing, but preeminently by a kind of sophisticated wit that incorporates playfulness and amusement even in the most serious of observations and that prevents even the most magisterial pronouncements from ever sounding pompous or self-important.
At the next meeting of the Milton Society of America, 170 colleagues attended the eulogy by Roland Frye, who spoke the truth of Patrides on glorious themes.
[25] The Society's Milton Quarterly published the eulogy of Frye (1987) and personal memorials by two dear friends, Professors Summers (1987) and Campbell (1987).