The 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth falls on December 9 this year, and Anna Beer’s biography is the opening fanfare of the celebrations. They are unlikely to prove tumultuous. Over the past 100 years Milton’s standing has declined more steeply than that of any other great English poet. For the Victorians he was supreme. Tennyson said that Lycidas was “the touchstone of poetic taste”. But the percentage of the current population who have read it, let alone Paradise Lost, must be infinitesimal. The reasons are clear. Milton’s art is rooted in Greek and Latin literature and in Christian theology, and the vast majority of the British people are ignorant of all three.

Conscious of Milton’s intimidating stature, Beer sets out to make him more approachable. He enjoyed living in London, she assures us, because it “was fun and it was sexy”, and he admired the Roman poet Horace who, “like most Latin authors”, wrote about “friendship and having fun”. In discussing Milton’s poems she strives to put the unbookish at their ease by using language they will find familiar. Satan, in Paradise Lost, is “a master of the sound bite”, and Adam and Eve are “like any dysfunctional unhappily married couple”.

The kind of reader who will be lured by these enticements is likely, however, to find a biography of Milton rather a let-down because so few intimate details are known about his private life. His relations with his three wives and his daughters remain uncertain, though they have proved a breeding-ground for fantasy and indignation. The most personal of all his poems, Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint, recounting a dream about his dead wife, used to be taken as evidence that at least his second marriage, to Katherine Woodcock, was happy. But Beer (mistakenly, I think) sides with those who argue that it may be about his first wife Mary Powell, so even that certainty disappears. Milton’s only well-documented relationship was with his school friend Charles Diodati, and Beer suggests that he “had problems” about it because, though he enjoyed Diodati’s company (“Charles was fun”), he felt intense erotic desire for him and knew it was sinful. There is no evidence for this, and all it seems to show is Beer’s inability to imagine a close friendship that is not sexual.

Although the private life remains hidden, an immense amount is known about Milton’s public activities – his campaigns as a Puritan pamphleteer in the 1640s, his passionate advocacy of a relaxation of the divorce laws, his ardent republicanism, his fearless championing of freedom of speech and conscience, and his defence, as secretary for foreign tongues to the Council of State, of the beheading of Charles I, in revenge for which his writings were publicly burnt in cities throughout Europe. Beer’s account of all this is vigorous, well researched and primed with piquant detail. How you prepare the heads of executed felons for display (answer: parboil them in bay salt and cumin seed to prevent putrefaction and to stop birds eating them) is not, for example, advice you come across in every biography.

But, by comparison, Milton’s poetry gets little coverage. This is in line with current trends. Modern Milton scholars are more inclined to write about his politics than his poetry. For one thing, it is easier. All the same, it seems topsy-turvy, for there have been other defenders of liberty, but only one man ever lived who could write poetry like Milton’s. Some poems – Arcades and At a Solemn Music, for example – go quite unnoticed by Beer. So does his first published poem, the sonnet on Shakespeare. Written when he was 22 and prefaced to the second folio of Shakespeare’s works, it is one of the earliest tributes to his genius, and might have been expected to prompt Milton’s biographer to trace the influence of Shakespeare on his art from the brilliant pastiche of Comus to Satan’s despairing quotation of Macbeth at a key moment in Paradise Regained.

Like other contemporary Miltonists, Beer regards Paradise Lost as a “political allegory” of Milton’s own times. Yet Paradise Lost celebrates a supreme autocrat, God, and condemns rebellion, whereas Milton celebrated rebellion and condemned autocracy. She seems to doubt Milton’s testimony that his poem was dictated to him by the “heavenly muse”, night by night, while he slept, and then taken down in the morning by an amanuensis. But there is corroboratory evidence that it was indeed composed in his sleep, and to acknowledge that it issued from his unconscious seems a first step towards understanding its turbulent and irreconcilable contradictions. As Beer notes, it grew out of terrible misfortune. In 1652 Milton went blind, and both his wife Mary and his infant son John died. He married again, and within two years his second wife and her daughter were dead. Then came the Restoration of Charles II and the collapse of all his hopes. He was derided, shamed and imprisoned. Jubilant enemies saw his blindness as God’s punishment for his rebellion. Nobody can know if that horrible idea occurred to Milton, or how far he was tempted to rebel against divine injustice. But what we do have are the passion, fury and defiance that are released into his poem, pitted against the God-fearing rectitude that compelled him to suppress them.

Reducing Paradise Lost to a political allegory denies this complexity, and Milton’s two other great works, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, also emerge from Beer’s brief scrutiny flattened and simplified. Paradise Regained is about Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, and Beer comments that Christ “undergoes his temptations as a man without any divine powers”. In fact, the critical controversy about the poem centres on whether he has divine powers or not. There is evidence for both views, which makes it an insolubly complicated artefact. That is no coincidence. Milton himself had a terrible tussle trying to decide in what sense Christ was divine, as his treatise on Christian Doctrine shows. Because some critics have doubted its authenticity, Beer dismisses this treatise in a single paragraph. But it would have been an apt task for a biographer to see how far its fiercely unorthodox beliefs tally with the development of his ideas in his published works.

In Samson Agonistes, too, Beer misses the crucial point. In the Book of Judges Samson prays to God for strength, and is granted it, before pulling down the building on the heads of the Philistines. But in Milton’s account the prayer is omitted, and Samson’s strength has already returned, so God is not implicated in the genocidal slaughter. Milton’s Samson may be, as Beer says, “God’s freedom fighter”, or he may be a freedom fighter who mistakenly believes he has divine sanction for mass murder. It is a point with some modern relevance.

Beer’s book is best on context. It vividly evokes the scenes that unfolded around Milton. What she fails to convey is the daring and intricacy of the thought in his poetry. He was by far the most intelligent and serious of English poets, and it seems probable that he would have regarded us, his descendants, as Gadarene swine. That is one reason why it would do us good to read him.

Mutilating Milton

Although his reputation as one of England’s preeminent poets was secured soon after he died in 1674, Milton has not always been well treated by later generations. A 1699 version of Paradise Lost, for instance, designed for readers who could not manage blank verse, put three extracts into heroic couplets and reduced the entire crucial encounter between Eve and Satan in Book IX to four singsong lines: “At length the serpent ranges thro’ the fields / He comes. He tempts, and as he temps [sic] she yields. / And now persuaded by a long dispute / She boldly tasted of the forbidden fruit.” The butchery was even worse in Oxford in 1683, where, during the persecution of nonconformists, one scholar remembered seeing his books being “publicly burnt by the hand of our Marshal in the court of our schools”.

Read on... websites:

www.literature.org/authors/milton-john/paradise-lost/
All 10 books of Milton’s most famous poem, available online

MILTON: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot by Anna Beer
Bloomsbury £20 pp480

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