Get started
Work

Making Darkness Light: A Life of John MiltonJoeMoshenska. New York: Basic Books, 2021. viii +464 pp. ISBN 13: 9781541620681. $35.00 (hardcover)

Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Something on which modern biographers of John Milton agree-perhaps the only thing on which they agree-is the epic quality of Milton biography, succinctly stated by Frank Kermode in the New York Review of Books in 2009: "The history of modern Milton biographies is an epic in itself" (26).Encompassing the "brief lives" by Edward Philips, John Aubrey, and Samuel Johnson; David Masson's six-volume Life of John Milton; innumerable biographical sketches in editions of Milton's poetry in dozens of languages; and, over the past quarter century, several more books written for academic and non-academic audiences, Milton biography traverses centuries, oceans, and borders.It also proves epic in the ways it traces the historical development of biography itself, charting changes in methodology and priority.What makes Joe Moshenska's Making Darkness Light a vital addition is its incorporation of speculation in telling A Life, not The Life of John Milton and its emphasis on how Milton matters in the lives of his readers.Making Darkness Light moves fluidly among fact, fancy, autobiography, and provocation.In its more strictly biographical portions, Moshenska mobilizes not simply what we know about Milton's life but also, and especially, what we don't know.The primacy of speculation is evident from the opening pages of the introduction.Here the author describes in lush detail two scenes of Milton writing Paradise Lost, scenes that register the two Miltons in his imagination: "The prophet and the scholar; the radical and the know-it all" (6).A third, very brief, strictly factual account of the epic's composition follows, inviting readers to consider all three.Following the book's introduction are eleven chapters divided into three parts that proceed in roughly chronological order.Any sense of linear progression is qualified by Moshenska's lush imaginings of key moments in Milton's life: the young boy walking home from St Paul's School (Chapter 3); the university student on holiday, attempting to write an Ode on the Nativity (Chapter 4); the Englishman meeting Galileo near the end of a European tour over which Paradise Lost "hover[s] … emerging as a rumbling and decreasingly distant possibility" (223; Chapter 7); the poet's unremarkable death after writing Samson Agonistes (Chapter 11).Even as these imaginings and the author's explanation of the cause of Mary Powell's departure from Milton's home seem somewhat inspired by what Linda Hutcheon coined historiographical metafiction in A Poetics of Postmodernism (Routledge, 1988), Moshenska responds more pointedly to what he characterizes as "unhelpful" binaries in many twenty-first-century biographies (127).Acknowledging the problems of male writers presuming to give voice to Mary's experiences, he points to the promise of recovering women's voices silenced by the early modern archive (281-85).In "Milton: Lives and Deaths," Geoffrey Wall describes the biographer as "master of the archive, but also and equally master of the subjunctive mood, of un-certainty, of non-factuality" (Cambridge Quarterly 39.1 [2010]: 92).And while some Milton biographers have leaned into speculation, others have minimized, or outright rejected, it.For example, in his Poet of Revolution (Princeton, 2020), Nicholas McDowell characterizes his approach as an "intellectual biography" that "includes elements of psychological speculation" (18).
DOI: 10.1111/milt.70007
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4416774942
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: