Customer Reviews

The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Blackwell Critical Biographies)

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Incredibly interesting and really a good, hard look at the life of John Milton and what inspired him and what aroused his wrath. His poems are eternal and deal with things secular and spiritual. His words have come down to us through many centuries and they are still as powerful as the day he wrote them. What a true genius! What a stunningly beautiful biography...I couldn't put it down.

This is truly a work of great erudition and scholarship. Well-written and much researched, I have found this the most interesting and most complete biography about the inestimable John Milton written heretofore. I highly, highly recommend this text to anyone who wishes to gain a keen understanding not only of John Milton's life, but the author gives a pertinent description of the times in which Milton lived--arcane details and customs without knowledge of which, Milton's genius and his prolific output would seem incomprehensible.

I am extremely grateful that I found this book and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in John Milton, the English Civil War, Cromwell's Protectorate, the Stuart Restoration, proto-Libertarianism, etc. This book stands out as a cynosure among many books written about this enigmatic but extremely important historical figure. The author is a distinguished authority on the subject and employs her wit and sagacity in analyzing and explaining the facts, insights, and settings of John Milton's genius.

I originally purchased David Hawkes' John Milton: A Hero of Our Time biography about John Milton and found it utterly wanting: little actual biographical account, much speculation, and many pages of criticism of capitalistic society. Hawkes spends many a page condemning the charging of interest rates, and the entire structure of finance and modern industry. No matter where one stands on those points, I believe it may be agreed that a biography ostensibly about the great John Milton is not the proper venue thereof.

This is, indeed, the most exhaustive modern biography of John Milton. The renowned critic Barbara Lewalski, as usual, offers the students and scholars of Milton an enchanting biographical masterpiece that both narrates and captures Milton's story and history from his early childhood "The childhood Strews the Man" to his last breath "Teach the every Soul". Mocking Samuel Johnson's theory on writing a biography, Lewalski, without eating, drinking, or living in social intercourse with Milton, has succeed in writing an impressive biography of Milton through, as she mockingly asserts, living in intellectual and artistic intercourse with Milton. Reading this book, to the surprise of Johnson, one will find him/herself eating, drinking, and living social intercourse with john Milton thanks to the scholarly talent of Barbara Lewlaski.