Milton

This 1879 biography of John Milton by Victorian scholar Mark Pattison is an ideal combination of author and subject.

Mark Pattison (Author)

9781108034753, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 November 2011

234 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.4 cm, 0.3 kg

This life of John Milton was first published in the English Men of Letters series in 1879. Its author, Mark Pattison (1813–84) spent most of his adult life in Oxford, as a student, a tutor, and eventually, from 1861, Rector of Lincoln College. Pattison's scholarly interest in religious thought in England, and in the history of classical learning after the Renaissance, made him the ideal biographer for the poet whose writing life was spent in justifying God's ways to man, and whose knowledge of Greek and Latin literature was almost unmatched. Pattison sees the life as divided into three periods: he provides a narrative of events and an analysis of Milton's literary output (both verse and prose) for each. The final chapter is a discussion of the major poems: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, concluding with the assertion of Milton's supremacy over all English writers except Shakespeare.

First Period. 1608–39: 1. Family - school - college
2. Residence at Horton - l'Allegro - Il Penseroso - Arcades - Comus - Lycidas
3. Journey to Italy
Second Period. 1640–60: 4. Education theory - teaching
5. Marriage and pamphlet on divorce
6. Pamphlets
7. Biographical. 1640–9
8. The Latin secretaryship
9. Milton and Salmasius - blindness
10. Milton and Morus - the second defence – the defence for himself
11. Latin secretaryship comes to an end - Milton's friends
Third Period. 1660–74: 12. Biographical - literary occupation - religious opinions
13. Paradise Lost - Paradise Regained - Samson Agonistes.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]