Milton and His Biographers

This chapter presents an overview of Milton's biographers from the earliest lives of the poet to the year 2000. The life of Milton has been a subject of quite a lot of accounts compared to other early modern English writers, due in part to the availability of early biographies by people who knew him; in part because of the towering status he enjoyed in the English canon despite attempts to unseat him; and in part because of his story, of poetic genius surrounding surviving political engagement, of resolution and moral courage overcoming great physical impairment. Biographers from Cyriak Skinner to Barbara Lewalski are discussed in the chapter, including the ebbs and flows of Milton biography and the ideological partiality among the biographers.