Overview

A fresh and engaging account of the life, times, politics, loves, and letters of the great English poet John Milton on the four hundredth anniversary of his birth.
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 on the four hundredth anniversary of his birth.

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9781596914711

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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. -- Guardian <p> 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. -- Economist <p> Beer gives a persuasive reading of the power and complexity of Paradis Lost, arguably the greatest religious poem in the English language. -- Times (London) <p> 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 <p> 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 theage he lived in. --Jack Lynch, author of Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife that Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard <p> 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

<p> 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. -- Guardian <p> 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. -- Economist <p> Beer gives a persuasive reading of the power and complexity of Paradis Lost, arguably the greatest religious poem in the English language. -- Times (London) <p> 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 wor

<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a crucial part of the biographer&#8217;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.&#8221;&#8212; Guardian <p>&#8220;Ms Beer roots Milton in his period very well, both historically and physically&#8212;in the streets of booksellers and printing presses around St Paul's cathedral in London.&#8221; &#8212; Economist <p>&#8220;Beer gives a persuasive reading of the power and complexity of Paradis Lost, arguably the greatest religious poem in the English language.&#8221; &#8212; Times (London) <p>&#8220;How refreshing to find Anna Beer&#8217;s new biography, which takes Milton as a real, whole, complex person.&nbsp;Beer&#8217;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

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