Samuel Johnson wrote famously of the poet John Milton’s 10,000-line signature work, Paradise Lost: “None ever wished it longer than it is.” The sheer length of this epic poem, together with Milton’s densely Latinate vocabulary and style and his 17th-century religious preoccupations — Adam and Eve, God and Satan — have made attacking the pages of Paradise Lost, or any other of Milton’s many works, a daunting proposition for most people today. Indeed, few college English departments these days even offer stand-alone undergraduate courses on Milton (1608-1674), once considered England’s greatest poet, even surpassing Shakespeare. The few that do try to lure students by tricking Milton out in the contemporary politics of greatest interest to their instructors: “gender,” “the poetics of revolution,” and so forth. I myself was lucky to have been taught Milton by a professor considered hopelessly old-fashioned even decades ago, who simply led us through the lines, explained the Homeric similes and other figures of speech, and pointed out how beautiful it all was.
Joe Moshenska, a professor of English at Oxford University, finds Milton’s poetry beautiful, too, and the highest points of this new biography are his eloquent close readings of passages of Paradise Lost. Milton gradually lost his eyesight during a career spanning the 1640s as a pamphleteer and, later, bureaucrat, for the Cromwellian side of the English Civil War. During that period, he wrote his famous 1642 treatise, Areopagitica, arguing for freedom of the press, as well as fiery tracts defending the beheading of King Charles I in 1649.
By 1652, Milton was completely blind, and it was only after that — and the Restoration of 1661 that finished him politically, as well as causing him to go briefly into hiding and even be imprisoned for a short time — that he began to work on his two greatest works, Paradise Lost, published in 1667, and his Greek-style tragedy Samson Agonistes about the fall of the biblical hero, published in 1671. He had to dictate those works as well as others, and as Moshenska points out, the trope of blindness runs through both. Samson was blinded — “eyeless in Gaza” — just as Milton was, and in Paradise Lost, themes of darkness and light function on many levels, including the poet’s contemplation of his own darkened condition that he hopes with divine inspiration to transcend: “So much the rather, thou celestial light / Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate, there plant eyes … that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight.” Moshenska comments that those lines “rehears[e] in their own tumbling beauty the phenomena that Milton can no longer experience.”
Moshenska explains that his book’s very title, Making Darkness Light, derives from a line in Paradise Lost in which Belial, one of the fallen angels who plots with Satan to destroy Adam, Eve, and their happiness in Eden, opines that the “horror” of hell “will grow mild, this darkness light.” Moshenska connects the line to Milton’s own poignant experience of his condition.
Alas, however, Moshenska’s real focus of interest in this biography turns out to be not so much Milton as Moshenska himself. The two share the same initials, J.M., as Moshenska points out, and so we learn much, very much, about Moshenska as the book unfolds: that he is a “Jewish atheist” by way of religion (he mentions this three or four times); the names of his Yiddish-speaking grandparents together with a list of their Yiddishisms; who his favorite 1960s folksinger was (the now-forgotten Leon Rosselson); how he likely voted on Brexit (“narrow-minded English nationalists”); his excursions around London and its environs in the company of one “Sean,” his former sixth-form English teacher, as they visited the sites of the various houses Milton lived in for research on Moshenska’s book; further excursions in 2020 as Moshenska retraced a grand tour of the major cities of France and Italy that Milton undertook in 1638 and 1639 after getting high honors at Cambridge; and his not quite finishing said retracing because COVID-19 barred him from Naples, the most southerly point of Milton’s tour.
Milton noted in his family Bible that he had been born on Dec. 9, 1608, at “half an howr after 6 in the morning.” This inspires Moshenska to do exhaustive research on 17th-century wall clocks and their mechanics (the results, including a photo of such a clock sent to him by a clock expert and some musings by Moshenska about Milton’s poetic interest in time, occupy 21 pages of his book), and then write an opening chapter in which someone downstairs in the family house notices that the minute hand is exactly between VI and VII just as baby Milton utters his birth wail upstairs. The problem: There is no evidence that the Milton family owned any sort of clock. As Moshenska points out, the family lived only a 10-minute walk from St. Paul’s Cathedral, then a Gothic edifice that burned down in the great London fire of 1666. Isn’t it more likely that, rather than peering at a clock on a dark December morning, whoever it was heard the church bells clanging?
Moshenska begins every chapter of his book with a similar set piece that is anywhere from mostly to wholly fictional and often includes himself. Milton’s father, John Milton Sr., a prosperous scrivener by trade, was also an accomplished amateur musician. So Moshenska says he decided to take piano lessons, even though the piano wasn’t invented until 1700, long after both John Miltons were dead. There is a fascinating blow-by-blow account of a dinner-table conversation in Paris in 1638 between Kenelm Digby, a leading English Catholic intellectual-in-exile — a “morose” man with “unkempt hair” dressed “entirely in black” — and the ferociously anti-Catholic Milton. But, you guessed by now, there is no evidence that the two ever met in their lives, although Milton, at least by his own account, did meet Galileo and other Italian notables in the arts and sciences while in Italy.
Elsewhere, Moshenska’s very 21st-century preoccupations intrude into his efforts to recreate the 17th. Milton was known as the “lady of Cambridge” during his studies there, likely because of his good looks and very fair skin, and he had close friends with other males. Two of them died during the late 1630s: Charles Diodati, for whom he composed a Latin elegy, and Edward King, who inspired one of his best-known and loveliest English poems, the pastoral Lycidas. So Moshenska surmises that Milton was, if not exactly homosexual, at the very least “queer.” Since Milton married three times during his life, each wife on the heels of the death of the last, “queer” doesn’t seem quite the appropriate adjective.
Milton’s theology was idiosyncratic. He could not align himself with any of the strands of Christianity roiling in his tumultuous era, although the great bulk of his English poetry was religious: Samson, Paradise Lost, and a shorter sequel to the latter, Paradise Regained, which focused on Satan’s temptation of Christ in the desert. He wrestled with the great theological problems of monotheism: how a good God can allow evil and why, if God is all-knowing, he nonetheless creates human beings whom he knows will be damned. Milton wrote Paradise Lost, as he said in one of its best-known lines, “to justify the ways of God to men.” Yet Moshenska cannot take any of this seriously. Milton’s God, to Moshenska, is simply “harsh, cruel, shrilly self-justifying.” This is just plain superficial.
And yet, Moshenska, with his sensitive readings of Milton’s lines, has performed a service: awakening a thirst to read more from the 17th-century colossus. Milton is indeed a difficult poet, not only Latinate, but composing English poetry as though it were Latin or Greek. For him, Paradise Lost was to be a classical epic, in the tradition of the Iliad and the Aeneid. He reveled in the classical trope of hyperbaton: rearranging the normal order of words to make them more beautiful and meaningful: “ … there plant eyes … that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight.” Using his blindness, he could paint vivid pictures in the minds of his readers as well as his own, and he had a blind man’s alertness to the aural cadences of sound. Samuel Johnson, who admired Milton immensely, said it best: “His great works were performed under discountenance and in blindness, but difficulties vanished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first.”
Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.
