Making Darkness Light
A Life of John Milton
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An innovative and elegant new biography of John Milton from an acclaimed Oxford professor
John Milton was once essential reading for visionaries and revolutionaries, from William Blake to Ben Franklin. Now, however, he has become a literary institution—intimidating rather than inspiring.
In Making Darkness Light, Oxford professor Joe Moshenska rediscovers a poet whose rich contradictions confound his monumental image. Immersing ourselves in the rhythms and textures of Milton’s world, we move from the music of his childhood home to his encounter with Galileo in Florence into his idiosyncratic belief system and his strange, electrifying imagination.
Making Darkness Light will change the way we think about Milton, the place of his writings in his life, and his life in history. It is also a book about Milton’s place in our times: about our relationship with the Western canon, about why and how we read, and about what happens when we let someone else’s ideas inflect our own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moshenska (A Stain in the Blood), a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, delivers a strikingly original biography of John Milton (1608–1674). He relies on "rhythms rather than facts" to reconstruct the life of the poet, who grew up in a house full of music and was attuned to musical cadences, which Moshenka suggests he incorporated as a fundamental part of his writing. Moshenska covers crucial moments in Milton's life and intellectual development, describing the day of Milton's birth; his wrestling with the question of "how to be a poet—what such a choice would mean"; his travels in Italy, where he studied the "nature of language" by immersing himself in Italian; and his theological ambitions in Paradise Lost. Personal interjections from Moshenska are peppered throughout and add depth: "Many readers—and I number among them—have struggled with the way in which he depicts God the Father as harsh, cruel, shrilly self-justifying." It's less a by-the-books account of Milton's life, and more like a poetic tour of 17th-century England as revealed by the manuscripts left behind by one of its most prominent writers. Literature lovers of all sorts will find something to savor here.
