Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot
By Anna Beer
Bloomsbury £20, 480 pages
FT bookshop price: £16
In the opening paragraph of “Paradise Lost” Milton declared that his “advent’rous song” would pursue “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”. The poem was composed in the wake of a similarly “advent’rous” experiment in politics that finally came to grief in the years following Cromwell’s death in 1658. As one of the chief apologists for the Commonwealth, Milton was high on the most wanted list of vindictive Royalists when Charles II assumed the throne in 1660.
In this climate, Milton was lucky to escape with his life. A proclamation of August 13 1660 announced that all copies of his books were to be burned by the hangman at the Old Bailey. Yet two days after the public conflagration of pamphlets such as “Areopagitica’’ (a magnificently eloquent defence of free speech), Milton was pardoned. It is not clear who wangled his exemption; possibly the Royalist branch of his own family, or well-placed friends such as Andrew Marvell. Blind, humiliated and utterly unrepentant, Milton settled in Holborn, where he began work on the greatest poem in the English language.
Milton’s life is an extraordinary one, many times told. Anna Beer’s new biography, timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of his birth, hasn’t much to add to previous attempts by Barbara Lewalski and A.N. Wilson, beyond a compulsion to speculate endlessly on the possibly homosexual nature of his friendship with Charles Diodati, to whom he wrote a number of verse letters in Latin.
The trouble with this argument is that the only evidence Beer presents is furnished by the poems themselves, which were all circulated in Milton’s own lifetime without suspicion that the poet was encoding an interest in sodomy. Beer points out the homoerotic episodes in Ovid or Virgil to which Milton’s poems refer, but she must know that Renaissance male friendship positively encouraged reference to Latin and Greek models of homosociality.
She is more convincing when assessing Milton’s relation to the politics of his time. Milton took up pamphleteering in 1641, just as the autocratic rule of Charles I was entering a critical phase. It was a surprising move for someone as intellectually refined as Milton, but he clearly relished his skirmishes with assorted enemies. Beer is good on his transformation from delicate scholar to robust polemicist, arguing in favour of divorce, religious toleration and the republic.
Like earlier biographers, Beer is stymied by the fact we know very little of Milton’s private life. His first wife, Mary Powell, returned to live with her parents only a few weeks after marrying John – as Beer somewhat irritatingly insists on calling him – but no documents survive to explain why. Is the wonderful sonnet “Methought I saw my late espoused saint” about Mary, another lover, or his second wife, Katharine, who died 18 months into their marriage? Its final lines suggest that the celebrant of the physical charms of Eve also felt strongly about at least one of his own three consorts: “But O as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
Mark Ford is professor of English literature at University College London
