1. R. F. Patterson, ed., Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden (London: Blackie and Son, 1923), 6.

2. See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); J. S. Smart, ed., The Sonnets of Milton (Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson, 1921); E. A. J. Honigmann, ed., Milton's Sonnets (London: Macmillan, 1966); John Carey, ed., John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, 2d ed. (Harlow, England: Longman, 1997); John Leonard, ed., John Milton: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1998).

3. Parker, Milton, 1:43.

4. Ibid., 1:43, 2:739n52; Don M. Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1:283n62.

5. Milton to a Friend, 1633, in Wolfe, Prose Works, 1:320.

6. Ibid., 4:583.

7. Milton to Alexander Gill, July 2, 1628, ibid., 1:314.

8. Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable, 1932), 63.

9. Parker, Milton, 1:300.

10. Stanley Kunitz, “The Sense of a Life,” in Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 234 [repr. from New York Times Book Review, October 16, 1977].