10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent book, September 5, 2009
This is a wonderful biography, clear and intelligent, involving and honest. When the record is silent, which often happens with Milton's private life, Beer frankly declares that we don't know. All previous talk of Milton's three marriages, that the first was miserable and the last beautiful, has been purely speculative. Beer raises different possibilities and questions, yet makes clear that the page is blank. We know much more about Milton's intense friendships with men and Beer suggests this was the heart of his emotional life. (He expected the same kind of friendship with his wives, which may have created its own difficulties.)
Beer is very good on the book trade of the 17th century and excellent on the politics of the era. In the course of giving context to Milton's life, she provides one of the most succinct but involving accounts of the English Civil War and Restoration I've ever read. She does not shy away from theological matters and gives special attention to the pamphlets on divorce and censorship. Her close reading of PARADISE LOST does not get mired in jargon. And she is not afraid to be funny, which is a nice surprise in a book about Milton.
This biography is so good that it even made me want to read PARADISE LOST again, a work that can be as challenging as late Henry James when you're not in the right mood.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poet / Philosopher Lives in Interesting Times, October 1, 2009
Milton's life spanned an incredible period of British History. Unlike the relative stability of Elizabethan England when his father improved the family financial and social station, Milton faced a chain of instability: James - Charles I - Civil War - the Cromwell regime in its various phases and demise - Charles II - further turmoil.
In the more halcyon days, Milton's writing on divorce brought him notoriety. It became even more negative political capital as events took their course. Milton continued to follow his conscience, supporting the Parliamentarians and advocating republican ideals as the country changed and changed again. His most enduring work comes from the times of his deepest loss.
From what I knew of him, I should have extrapolated his political gains and losses with each regime change, but didn't. The book brings the truth alive in unambiguous prose. The author shows how his work fits his life, what he did and what he thought. What was fully new to me was Milton's blindness. The book also illustrates how the misogyny of the time rubbed off on Milton who had 3 wives and 3 daughters.
I chose this book, not so much for Milton, but for the times, and Anna Beers did not disappoint. She places Milton squarely in these times showing how he was of them and how they affected him. The end, devoted to an explication of Milton's most noted works will not disappoint those who read it for literary history.
I recommend this very readable book for anyone interested in the history or the literature of the time.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A genius soul at the heart of the start of modern British history, March 16, 2011
Yet another biography of Milton. Why? University of Oxford Lecturer Anna Beer wastes no words in her refreshingly concise preface and states her goal in the first sentences: Milton was one of the world's greatest writers but "...the myth of the puritanical ascetic who hated women and took it on himself to justify his God has displaced the complex, erudite man who wrote those influential works and earned his place in the canon. At the quartercentenary of his birth, it is time for a re-assessment of John Milton's life, work and times." The reader is not disappointed. Beer applies an informed and lucid razor to the assumptions of many commentaries on Milton that have no basis. She knows the sources and makes no extravagant hypotheses. There is no need; Milton's literary, political and historic life was fantastically rich. Now that Milton's worship of chastity and manhood--including an amusingly profound reverence of semen--and his conventional but robust misogyny are well documented, what can we make of his life?
Beer succeeds in showing that Milton, malgré tout, deserves a huge but qualified respect. Few people who achieve greatness are free of evil or at least distasteful aspects. The author rarely offers a personal judgement: once about a particularly sloppy and resoundingly sexist remark from William Parker, the "most renowned" Milton biographer of the 20th century (who assumed that Milton's daughters were innately dim, although it was obvious that they were not given a decent education) and later about the shame of Oxford for having happily obeyed a royal request to burn Milton's books in 1660. Although this is the only Milton biography I have read, one gets the impression that this enjoyable, 400-page book offers complete coverage of the most important aspects of Milton's work and family life and is probably unique in its modern, "post-feminist", historically disciplined approach. The book was especially engrossing because of Milton being a visionary at the epicentre of the civil war, writing for the moment and yet timelessly.
This concludes my review. The following are only my notes Milton's life with some comments on Anna Beer's book. The chapters dealing directly with Milton's works are well done but difficult to summarize.
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At first one wonders why bother to read about a linguistic child prodigy (born 1608) from a rising, genteel family who led a precious literary life in London, who did a BA and an MA at Cambridge (he was bullied and forced out but graduated cum laude), who wrote politically irrelevant poems and who made an idyllic journey among the Italian literati. Then things start to rip apart. When Milton visits Florence in 1638 he discovers both the liberation of meeting great European minds and his own English and Protestant identity. While he is away, his only close friend dies. He is devastated. Britain is menaced by volatile religious hatred, corrupt bishops and conflicts between Parliament and the rotten and incompetent monarchy. Milton returns to London. Although he never gave up his aim for "immortality" in his writing, he suddenly matures towards writing everything with a purpose. He joins the fray vigorously in cheap print pamphlets. He condemns the gaudy, orthodox bishops and the ill-educated prelates, harshly taxing their parishes while living elsewhere. He advocates the separation of church and monarchy. He has "found his public voice", the orator as soldier.
It was dangerous. Some authors were tortured and mutilated merely for criticising bishops. Since the King saw his power linked with the episcopacy ("No bishop, no King"), the ferocious attacks on the bishops by the people and by Parliament clearly challenged the King. It is strangely encouraging to see that even 17th century politics were no better than politics today, both relying heavily on specious arguments and the low-brow, below-the-belt ad hominems. If society survived the nonsense then, perhaps, perhaps it will survive now.
Despite social oppression of women and the likelihood of poverty and starvation for single women, Milton's pamphlet advocating a loosening of divorce law was not at all concerned about women's plight in abusive marriage. Although he argued that both men and women should be free to end a failed marriage and marry again, his emphasis was on the need to liberate men and his aim was to secure male authority in marriage. The pamphlet, dated 1643, was informed from Milton's bitter experience of 1642: a sudden wedding to Mary Powell, shortly after which his new wife moved back to her parents who were debtors to the Miltons. At the same time, the conflicts between King and Parliament became vicious. It was civil war.
In the middle of chaos, after Presbyterian attacks on his divorce pamphlet, Milton published "Aeropagitica" in 1644, a "speech" to Parliament favouring freedom of expression and against censorship. For Beer it is "one of the most powerful and inspirational works of the English language." Milton writes: "For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are: nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them... as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book... a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, then a fool will do of a sacred discipline." There is good and evil in the world, and human beings have to confront both; "that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary." The prohibition of printing leads to problems far worse than whatever concerns the censors.
Although stung by Parliament's support of the attacks on his divorce pamphlet, Milton reaffirmed his loyalty to Parliament. "Aeropagitica" ends by invoking a vision of England: "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks." He rejected utopian politics and began to live in the real world. Authorship was battle: "I refuse no Occasion and avoid no Adversary, either to maintain what I have begun or give it up for better reason."
Bad harvests and religious, economic, political and military crises came to a head in 1945. Cromwell became leader of the parliamentary forces. The monarchists fared poorly. The Leveller movement demanded rights and equality for the common man. Milton's blindness began to set in. His wife Mary, coming from a monarchist family, returned to him, but her motivation is no longer known. She would bear several children before herself dying in childbirth in 1652. Two daughters survived. Only short notes appear in the family bible about its members. Few details remain. His mother-in-law once described him as a bullying husband.
The illiberal Presbyterians moved to become the State Church. This was just as bad for Milton as the bishops were. He demands separation of Church and State. He further established himself and his writing by printing his poems. Milton's respectability had been called into doubt by the divorce controversy, so the publication confirmed him as educated, intellectual, moral and from the social élite. Survival occupied everyone's minds, but Milton's politics helped him to prosper from his rents. In one of his few personal letters, he tells an Italian friend of his "almost perpetual loneliness."
MPs seeking negotiation with the King were eliminated, leaving the Rump Parliament loyal to the army. Charles I was beheaded. The nation shocked itself. The European monarchies immediately activated as enemies. Milton embraced the role of revolutionary republican and took a strong stance condemning the King's wickedness. The Parliament abolished the monarchy and House of Lords. The status of religion in the new Commonwealth was unclear at first, with only limited toleration of sects. Parliament scoffed at the pleas of a proto-feminist movement for better treatment of women; they should go home and wash the dishes. Cromwell reacted with force against the Levellers' democratic movement. Milton harnessed his disappointment with the revolution by writing his "History of Britain", to be published much later. Six weeks after the regicide, Milton accepted an invitation by the new government to be Secretary of Foreign Tongues, a critical position for diplomatic correspondence with other nations. His indisputable Latin and genteel position gave the credibility the government sought. He countered monarchist propaganda and advocated liberty for the people to become "the architects of their own happiness". His republican "Defense of the English People" established him as a European intellectual celebrity defending liberty. Milton was respected and busy. He had attained status, as he had desired as a young man. 1649 led to perhaps the happiest time of his life.
If it was, it was a short happiness. By 1651 he was completely blind. He had headaches and was "burdened and shaken with flatulence". Mary died in 1652 and their only son shortly afterwards. Milton continued his propaganda, including work with Andrew Marvell. In 1656 Milton enacted his ideal by marrying Katherin Woodcock in a purely civil wedding. She gave birth to John's fourth daughter a year later, then died shortly afterwards of tuberculosis.
Cromwell increasingly took the appearance of a monarch, dissolved Parliament in 1653 and lurched towards dictatorship. In 1656 James Harrington proposed a republic that "entailed regular elections for all public offices and secret ballots among a citizenry of independent gentlemen". Beer writes: "Harrington's republicanism would be profoundly influential on the constitutions of the early American colonies, and...
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