Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot

By Anna Beer

'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 His Dark Materials

A fresh and engaging account of the life of the great English poet and pamphleteer John Milton

For centuries John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and many other poetic works, and of radical pamphlets on free speech, divorce and political rights, has emerged from biographies as a woman-hating domestic tyrant or a saintly blind man.

But, as Anna Beer shows, his personal life was just as rich and complex as his professional one. By close and groundbreaking analysis of Milton's careful editing of his own life, his wider family's affairs, the records of his government work, and the history of England during one of its most tumultuous periods of social and cultural life, Beer brings both the poet and his period to vivid life.
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'A splendidly patient and careful biography' Telegraph

'It succeeds magnificently ... perhaps the greatest compliment that one can pay this book is that, having finished it, one is immediately inspired to return to Milton's works' Mail on Sunday

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781408820681

Anna Beer

Anna Beer is a cultural historian, and the author of biographies of Milton, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Lady Bess Ralegh. Her most recent book is Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, also published by Oneworld. She is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford and lives in Oxford, England. Follow her on Twitter @annarosebeer.

Reviews for Milton

[riverwillow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a well-researched, if somewhat dry, biography of Milton. To be fair to Anna Beer, little is known of Milton's personal life which Beer find frustrating and makes it hard for any biographer to get close to the man behind the poems and the tracts, but Beer's solution of quoting from contemporary texts has the effect of distancing the reader from its subject. However her literary analysis of the major works is fascinating, the section on 'Paradise Lost' is particularly informative, and this is what lifts this book above the average.

[currerbell-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Milton's a difficult subject for a biography. We know more about him than any other major writer of the 17th century, given his involvement in revolutionary politics and his employment as Latin Secretary by the commonwealth's Council of State. Yet so much of what we know is only the outer Milton, the public Milton – and also the persona that Milton chooses to disclose of himself in autobiographical snippets within the polemical pamphlets. Beer delivers a decent biographical presentation, and her discussion of the polemical essays is particularly valuable.If your interest is the poetry, through, you'd be better off reading the supplementary materials in the two Norton Critical volumes because Beer's discussion of the poetry is at a fairly elementary level.