Outline: Overview, Breakdown of Milton biography and his writing, then an exploration of all of the criticism, followed by the conclusion.
I would say that the exploration of the criticism takes up the vast majority of the paper, and organizing the different articles by a certain theme and splitting it up into different sections might make it much more digestible and not as daunting. I think that going over a basic biography of Milton and his works is a good thing to get out of the way early in the paper, since I don't expect many people to have a deep understanding of the man and his style of writing.