John Milton

Neil Forsyth

Description

John Milton has usually been regarded as 'the other great poet' in English literature, after Shakespeare. He is the only one of the world's great poets also to have been actively engaged in politics. A radical Protestant and staunch republican, he served as Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth. After the restoration of Charles II, his life was probably saved by his fame as a poet. Apart from the great poems like Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, Milton also wrote eloquent treatises on topics including divorce, freedom of the press, kingship and education. This lively new biography by a renowned Milton scholar explores the psychological complexities of a man who must be counted one of the most significant and fascinating writers and thinkers of all time.

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• English
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Lion Hudson
• Date de parution: 17 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745959139
• Langue: English

Extrait

John Milton
A Biography
For James and Alice and the families connected to all of us.
John Milton
A Biography
N EIL F ORSYTH
Text copyright 2008 Neil Forsyth This edition copyright 2008 Lion Hudson
The right of Neil Forsyth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Lion Books an imprint of Lion Hudson plc Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England www.lionhudson.com/lion
ISBN 978 0 7459 5310 6 (print) ISBN 978 0 7459 5913 9 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7459 5912 2 (kindle)
First edition 2008 First electronic edition 2013
Acknowledgments Scripture quotations taken from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown s Patentee, Cambridge University Press.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image: Portrait of John Milton, Corbis
Contents

Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction: Blind Love

1 St Paul s

2 Cambridge

3 Early Signs of Genius

4 Studious Retirement

5 Coping with Death: Lycidas

6 Foreign Parts

7 No Bishop, No King

8 Mary Powell

9 Civil War

10 New Houses, and a Family

11 Rudest Violence

12 Image Breaking

13 Blindness

14 Cromwell Protector

15 A Long Argument to Prove That God is Not the Devil

16 Expiring Liberty

17 With Dangers Compast Round

18 Plague, and Paradise Lost

19 Fire and War

20 Adam, Eve - and Satan

21 Milton s Womb: Chaos, Hell and the Ribs of Gold

22 Emptying the Desk

23 Paradise Regained

24 Final Accomplishment

Epilogue

References
Abbreviations

Campbell
Gordon Campbell. A Milton Chronology. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
Carey
John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey. London: Longman, 1971; second ed. 1997.
CM
The Columbia Milton , i.e. The Works of John Milton, ed. F. A Patterson, et al. 18 vols in 21. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-38.
DDD 1
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. First edition. Quoted from J. Max Patrick, ed. The Prose of John Milton. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1967.
DDD 2
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Second edition. Quoted from YP.
EL
The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965
Flannagan
The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Fowler
John Milton: Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler. London: Longman, 1971; second ed 1998
Lewalski
Barbara Lewalski. The Life of John Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Leonard
John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard. London: Penguin, 1998.
LR
Life Records of John Milton, ed. J.M. French, 5 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1949-58.
MQ
Milton Quarterly
PL
Paradise Lost
PMLA.
Publications Of The Modern Language Association
PR
Paradise Regained
SA
Samson Agonistes
YP
Yale Prose , i.e. the Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Gen ed. Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-80.
Preface

In the dream I am wearing white gloves, like Alice s White Rabbit. I am touching a precious book. There is only one copy in existence of this book, which seems to be the first edition of Milton s tribute to his beloved friend Charles Diodati. (The book is in the British Library in London, along with many other texts of which there is only one copy, such as Milton s family Bible.) After some straightforward negotiations, I am allowed to see the book, though I have to wear the white gloves to avoid spoiling it with my sweaty hands. I am grateful for the staff s obvious care, and hope that it was not just my shifty eyes that kept a guardian present the whole time. In a variant of the same dream, it takes a good deal longer for me to be allowed to see the bound manuscript in which Milton kept a record of his earlier writings and projects. (This must be in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.) The staff are not really polite, merely haughty - something I learned to expect of officials during my undergraduate years at that university, which was also Milton s. (He, too, did not like it much.) Before I can open the book or even touch the manuscript, I wake up.
These are guilt dreams, I know. I have not done the proper legwork in order to write this book; I have not spent hours in the archives, crossing the Atlantic several times to view manuscripts and pictures (such as the lovely portrait of the ten-year-old Milton in the Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York). It is at least temporarily reassuring that many such documents have been on view in the major exhibitions celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Milton s birth, at the Bodleian in Oxford, at Milton s college in Cambridge as well as at the University Library, and at the New York Public Library. This book is, as a former student told me in a kindly but firm tone, a work of haute vulgarisation . That is, I have tried to transmit to as wide a readership as possible the results of the scholarly researches of others, along with some of my own opinions. My task, as I saw it, was to write a biography of Milton that would excite readers who might be merely curious, and who would like to know why Milton is so widely loved and admired, and even, sometimes, detested. I hope you who are reading will begin to see why Wordsworth wrote a sonnet in 1802, at a moment of political turmoil, which begins:

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
England hath need of thee.
I must thank in particular Gordon Campbell, both for his 1996 re-edition of William Riley Parker s 1968 elegant and learned Milton: A Biography , and for his painstaking and meticulous 1997 Chronology . I have made especial use, as everybody should, of Barbara Lewalski s recent and authoritative Life of John Milton (2000, revised edition 2003). I feel rather nervous about the occasions I have found myself disagreeing with her (especially regarding how early Milton became a radical), and I know I have borrowed too much from her magisterial book. If you want to follow up anything from this book, go first to Lewalski or Campbell. Other accounts I have found stimulating in different ways include those by Anna Beer, Cedric Brown, Steven Fallon, Roy Flannagan, Peter Levi and Angus Wilson. The endnotes will sometimes give the necessary references, but I have tried to keep those to a minimum. For quotations from Milton s poetry I have not been able to resist the old-spelling texts of Roy Flannagan s Riverside edition (or occasionally the texts available online at the Milton Reading Room). They may seem a little strange at first, but you soon get used to them, and they open the reading world of Milton s contemporaries directly to our experience. I have sometimes used John Leonard s translations of the Latin in the Penguin Complete Poems , and I have regularly consulted, and occasionally quoted, the richly annotated Longman editions of John Carey and Alastair Fowler. For the prose I use, as everybody now does, the Complete Prose Works , published by Yale University Press. I also have to thank Princeton University Press for their habitual generosity in allowing me to rework several pages from my book on Paradise Lost , entitled The Satanic Epic .
Good friends have been kind enough to read through earlier drafts of this book: Lukas Erne, Indira Ghose, Elizabeth Kaspar, John Leonard, Richard Waswo. Many changes have resulted from their suggestions and vigilance. I trust the reader will remember that the errors and infelicities that remain are all my own achievement. I am also happy to be able to thank the staff at Lion Hudson for the invitation to write this book, and for their helpful patience in seeing it to completion.
Many other debts must go unrecorded. The community of Milton scholars lives in a world of constant exchange, and I hope my friends and colleagues in that world will forgive any unacknowledged thefts they recognize. For those of you who may be coming to Milton for the first time, I wish you as much pleasure in the reading of this book as I have had in the writing of it.
Introduction: Blind Love

It is customary these days to begin a biography not with the hero s birth, indispensable as that event is, but with a revealing and typical incident, one which quickly opens a window onto the life, and into the psyche, of the subject. I here violate the custom only slightly, since the representative moment I have chosen is not quite an incident but two lines of poetry about a dream. At the end of a sonnet in which Milton recounts a dream of his dead wife, whom he had never seen because they were married after his blindness became total, he writes:

But O as to embrace me she enclin d,
I wak d, she fled, and day brought back my night.
The lines have moved me on every reading since the first, when I was a young student. All the harsh, negative and often foolish things that are said or believed about Milton evaporate next to the felt intensity of these words. Frustrated love, the inability to reach what one most desires, the slight and touching note of self-pity at the inevitability of forever waking to see nothing, all these and many other feelings are suggested. Yet the lines, intensely personal as they are, conceal a learned allusion to Aeneas s vision of his wife Creusa in Virgil, and the poem begins with an explicit reference to Euripides tragedy Alcestis , in which the heroic bride is brought back to her undeserving husband from the dead. Not being able to have what one desires is a standard topic in Petrarchan sonnets. This combination of profound emotion and