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Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton
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About This Book
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 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.
Reviews
"Just as the many languages the poet mastered bubble underneath the rhythms of his verse, so too does Moshenska's method float freely between different literary genres, and ranges widely over disparate periods of literary history."
"not so much an exercise in biography as a combination of memoir and of that most American of disciplines, Comparative Literature."
"several fictional passages...replace close readings of supporting evidence—from correspondence to household bills—as to what kind of man Milton may have been, and serve only to make us feel that the book is not so much a distillation of research as a self-portrait of the don as creative writer ..."
"Literature lovers of all sorts will find something to savor here."
"It records incidents that might have happened in Milton's life, but did not, and it adds fictitious details when recording those that did ..."
"With no aspirations to produce a definitive biography, Moshenska has crafted, instead, an incisive portrayal."
"Moshenska makes light of Milton and his works as he traverses 11 crucial days in his life."
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