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Milton

Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot

Bloomsbury Press, August 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-678-4, ISBN10: 1-59691-678-8,
5.5 x 8.25 inches, 480 pages, B&W,
Trade Paperback, $20.00

Praise
Biography

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See All Categories Literature Literary Criticism, Essays, & Biography

John Milton is one of the world’s greatest poets, renowned author of the epic Paradise Lost as well as numerous sonnets and other works. But he was also deeply involved in the political and religious controversies of his time. Fully immersed in the new and rapidly changing print culture, Milton wrote a series of radical pamphlets on free speech, divorce, and religious, political, and social rights that proposed a complete rethinking of the nature and practice not only of government, but of human freedom itself.

Having put his pen at the service of Parliament against King Charles, and his Latin at the service of Cromwell’s new commonwealth, when the Restoration came Milton was lucky to escape with his life. By then completely blind, he persevered, creating the majestic works that made him immortal.

For centuries, Milton has emerged from biographies either as a blind, saintly figure removed from the messy business of personal affections, or as a woman-hating domestic tyrant. Yet as Anna Beer shows, he was neither ogre nor paragon. Milton had intense and often troubled relationships with both men (such as his early, passionate friendship with Charles Diodati) and women (throughout his three marriages).

By closely examining all aspects of Milton’s life—his poetry, his prose, his Latin writings, his careful editing of his own biography, the records of his government work, and the social and political history of England during one of its most tumultuous periods (an era that ran from Shakespeare’s plays to Samuel Pepys’s diaries)—Anna Beer succeeds in bringing a celebrated and enigmatic writer to vivid life.

Praise

“Judicious . . . well researched and pleasantly opinionated."—Frank Kermode, The New York Review of Books

“It’s a crucial part of the biographer’s job to lead readers back through the life to the work. Beer does this very steadily and very well, and thereby gives Milton the anniversary present he deserves.”—The Guardian

“Ms Beer roots Milton in his period very well, both historically and physically—in the streets of booksellers and printing presses around St Paul's cathedral in London.”—The Economist

“Beer gives a persuasive reading of the power and complexity of Paradise Lost, arguably the greatest religious poem in the English language.”—The Times (London)

“This biography puts forward the facts of Milton's life with aplomb and clarity, and handles sensitive issues with common sense.”—American Scholar

“How refreshing to find Anna Beer’s new biography, which takes Milton as a real, whole, complex person. Beer’s Milton is a writer of prodigious creativity, in Latin and English, prose and verse, but he always relates to his time and place, in the teeming, cruel streets of London and the brilliant academies of Italy. She gives us clear, common-sense readings of the literature, vivid evocations of the social and political world, and probing yet sympathetic analyses of Milton’s own emotional states, when he was ‘in love with a man’ or an ideal. The biographer and the subject share the qualities that he himself most valued in poetry: simple, sensuous and passionate.”—James Grantham Turner, author of One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton and Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534-1685

“Anna Beer offers the most readable biography yet of the author of the most important poem in the English language. No one in the last 400 years has produced such a comprehensive portrait of the private man, the public citizen, the sublime poet, and the age he lived in.”—Jack Lynch, author of Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife that Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard

“This is a beautifully clear account of a richly complex life, an account which is also fascinatingly vivid on the political and social background of the time. It's the best narrative I've read of the life of our greatest public poet.”—Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass

“There is no more richly and scrupulously researched examination of Milton’s life than Anna Beer’s authoritative account.”—A.C. Grayling, author of Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius

“A well researched, graceful account of the life of a literary giant.”—Kirkus Reviews

“An excellent addition to the literature on [Milton's] life and work.”—Library Journal

“Four hundred years after John Milton's birth, biographer and Oxford lecturer Beer presents a loving tribute, a portrait of the poet in all his humanity. Drawing on newly available archives, Beer elegantly chronicles Milton's life from his precocious childhood (he read Greek and Latin when he was five) to his embattled support of Cromwell and his mature religious and political writings. Beer points out that Milton wasn't a one-note writer, but excelled in producing religious pamphlets (The Reason of Church Government), treatises on education and divorce (Areopagitica and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce) and epic poetry (Paradise Lost). Although the specifics of Milton's three marriages are well known, Beer reveals the details of a little-discussed aspect of the poet's life: his passionate, and perhaps homoerotic, friendship with Charles Diodati. Planting Milton firmly in his time, one of political and religious upheaval, Beer's splendid biography portrays Milton as both a radical and a traditionalist who drew on classical and Christian sources to contend again and again for freedom from tyranny and oppression.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author(s)

Anna Beer

Anna Beer is lecturer in literature and a fellow of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of the acclaimed Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter.