Milton is Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh’s elegant critical study of John Milton, the poet of Paradise Lost. Raleigh, an influential Edwardian professor of English literature, examines Milton’s life, character, and major poems, paying special attention to the grandeur of his style and the moral seriousness of his imagination.
Rather than mere biography, the book is a sustained appreciation of Milton as artist and personality, alert both to his sublimity and to the strangeness of his great epic. Raleigh writes with a graceful, confident prose of his own, and his judgments—some admiring, some sharply critical—reflect the literary taste of his era. For students of Milton and of English criticism alike, this remains a stimulating and readable introduction to one of the supreme poets of the language.