A lapidary new biography of John Milton, from an award-winning Oxford professor, emphasizing what the poet offers readers today
For most of us, John Milton has been relegated to the dusty pantheon of the greats of English literature, removed from this world and only focused on the higher things. But, behind the myth is an extraordinary and complicated human being: A revolutionary and an apologist for regicide who spoke and wrote in ten languages. A man of learning who went to collect a debt one day and returned with a wife. A lover of music and arts who grew up in the shadow of London. A scholar and a poet who wrote propaganda for Oliver Cromwell.
In Untitled, Milton scholar Joe Moshenska clears the cobwebs from this titan of English literature and crafts a spirited and singular biography. In Moshenska's hands, the 17th century world comes to vivid life, as inflection points in Milton's biography (his blindness, his government job, his unhappy marriage) become portals into discussions of the nature of creativity, identity, and freedom of expression. Moshenska also illustrates how Milton's work has served as a lodestar for subsequent generations of poets and writers-from Blake and Whitman, to Woolf and Nabokov-and revolutionaries (the documents produced by the Founding Fathers, for example, were heavily influenced by Milton's own political writings). By establishing the man in this wider frame, Untitled will forever change the way we think about Milton and his work: no longer a dusty Puritan, but a man whose contradictions and resistance to authority feels distinctly modern.
Elegant and inventive, Untitled deeply considers why Milton's poems continue to call us back, to inspire us, and to guide how we think about life's most profound questions. It's a book about Milton, but it's also a book about why we might want to read anything at all - about what happens when we choose over time to let another life, another's words, into our own.
