The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght

Barbara Josephine Kiefer Lewalski was born in Topeka, Kansas on February 22, 1931. She received a bachelor of science degree in education and a master's degree from Kansas State Teachers College and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. She began her academic career as an instructor at Wellesley College and went on to become the first woman to be granted tenured and endowed professorships in the English departments of Brown University and Harvard University.

She was a Renaissance scholar and expert on the poet John Milton. She wrote numerous books including Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained; Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms; Writing Women in Jacobean England; and The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize in 1979. She received a lifetime achievement award from the Renaissance Society of America in 2016. She died of a heart attack on March 2, 2018 at the age of 87.

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