Reference Works in the Here and the Hereafter

From here at the offices of Milton Quarterly, the center of what English scholars used to call “the American Milton Industry,” one can be appalled by the fact that there are still more books and articles published about Milton during the average year than any one scholar with a full teaching load can keep up with. We swim against a strong tide. We can’t keep up. And we are the professionals: it’s part of our job to keep up.

In the interest of helping the readers of MQ keep up, I will in this review at least mention some recent reference works on Milton, books written and books soon to be published. Reference books, incidentally, are books for which the reader will likely use the index and the bibliography as often as the text.

The first is Cedric Brown’s John Milton: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). It fills a very useful niche, that of the short biography that also examines the poetry and prose. A.N. Wilson’s short biography did just that a number of years ago, but it was written by a professional biographer and well-respected novelist, not a Milton scholar. It was readable, but it got some significant details wrong.

Peter Levi’s Eden Renewed: The Public and Private Life of John Milton (London: Macmillan, 1996) is insular to Oxford University, protected against any recent biographical discovery (Levi never bothered to read Leo Miller, John Shawcross, Paul Sellin, Gordon Campbell, or any of a dozen or so Milton scholars who have turned up significant biographical information recently). Levi’s book mentions no reference material and offers only poetic insights into Milton’s methods of composition, since Levi is a poet and emeritus fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. John Carey trashed Levi’s biography in a very funny review in the Sunday London Times.

Cedric Brown’s literary life is something completely different. It is a serious, careful, well-researched, and succinct biography, in the line of J.H. Hanford’s John Milton, Englishman (New York: Crown, 1949) and, more recently, John Shawcross’s John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1993). Brown’s perspective is not chauvinistic or insular: he knows what’s going on on both sides of the pond. Those of us who know Brown’s work, and especially the elegant little book on aristocratic entertainments, know that he never puts a sentence on paper without carefully considering the facts behind it. He never leaps to conclusions. I believe his book would make a very good accompanying text for a graduate seminar on Milton, or for an honors college undergraduate seminar, though certainly the Cambridge Companion to Milton would also fit that description, as would John Peter Rumrich’s generalized critical introduction to Milton published by Cambridge UP in 1996, and Lois Potter’s A Preface to Milton (revised edition; London: Longman, 1986). If one is concentrating on Paradise Lost, then Thomas Corns’s Regaining Paradise Lost (London: Longman, 1994) should be considered, as should David Loewenstein’s Milton: Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). I should not neglect Annabel Patterson’s John Milton, a collection of essays in the Critical Readers series from Longman (London: Longman, 1992), which demonstrates the effects of recent theory—feminist, deconstructionist, Freudian, Marxist, whateverist—on the study of Milton. Patterson’s long introduction defines old and new perspectives, as do the essays by Froula, Guillory, Fish, and Nyquist.

The big news about large Milton biographies is in the abundance of books just in print or about to be. Gordon Campbell’s revision of William Riley Parker’s standard biography is just out from Oxford: Clarendon, dated 1996, and dubbed “Second Edition”; so we shall all have to quote from the revised two volumes rather than the 1968 edition (though the pagination of the first volume is the same as that of the earlier edition). Campbell has not re-written Parker’s text (Ms. Parker wouldn’t let him), but he has corrected and augmented the extremely valuable notes: his additions are marked...