South Central Review

Recent scholarship on the life and works of John Milton (1608-1674) exemplifies the ways in which studies in British Civil War and Restoration Literature are flourishing. This poet turned propagandist turned poet composed verses whilst a teenager studying at Cambridge University during the 1620s, prose whilst serving Oliver Cromwell's Republican experiment, and epic verses whilst lying low at the Restoration of the Monarchy. Milton's fate during his lifetime was tied inextricably to the affairs of state, and, as we see in current scholarship, the breadth and passionate intensity of his work stimulates a comparable devotion [End Page 196] among those of our colleagues whose research is dedicated to understanding Milton, both his context and his legacy.

Albert Labriola's collection of essays brings together the works of well regarded experts in literary history to tease out a highly nuanced portrait of Milton's work inside his chaotic century, which was the backdrop for such bizarre spectacles as the murder of one king eleven years before the open philandering of another, a religious war that would span decades and the outlawing of Christmas (albeit temporarily) in the midst of a national church doctrine that metamorphosed from Anglican to Puritan before settling into an awkward juxtaposition of various and sundry localized protestant faiths with occasional tolerance and ever-present dissent. Sharon Achinstein opens the volume reminding readers that "nestled inside the term history" is the term storia, the stories that propagate meaning over the centuries (Labriola 4). And so it does in Labriola's volume, as essays by Ann Baynes Coiro and Achsah Giubbory utilize a biographical approach, essays by Laura Lunger Knoppers and Annabel Patterson work with the history of scriptural interpretation and essays by David Loewenstein, Thomas Fulton, Martin Dzelzainis and Paul Stevens climb bravely across the land mine of seventeenth-century ideologies.

In stark contrast to the contextualizing work of Labriola's Milton Studies volume stands Gordon Teskey's Delirous Milton. The book's argument is based on the premise that Milton studies can only ever be theoretical studies because Milton himself was a theoretical poet, as evidenced by the conceptualizing nature of Milton's poetics of state, liberty, nature, and God. Teskey's discussion of Milton's fate in modernity, then, seeks not to contextualize, but to trace the ways in which understanding Milton is a means "to understand what it means to be a poet on the threshold of a post theological world" (Teskey 5). The nearness of poetry to prophecy has Milton simultaneously looking back on creation as he looks forward to the future he creates in his writings. And the poet's creative energy is rooted in a "rift at the center of his consciousness over the question of creation itself" (5). That rift is the delirium of Teskey's Milton, derived from the Latin root lira, which is the rim of earth discarded by a plow which serves to guide the plowman. One who is de-lirious is then someone who wanders away from that earth-bound guide. Teskey's Milton, likened to Jim Morrison of The Doors, wanders away from the guide in order to create something that "feels more artistically true" (5). The Milton of Teskey's book is straddling a gateway between divine conceptions of prophetic artistry and modernity's secularized elevation of creativity to the sublime.

It might appear, then, that a presentist understanding of Milton is at odds with the contextualizing endeavors of Milton scholarship, especially when Labiola's volume opens by definitively stating that "Milton has always been in 'in history'" and Testkey's book maintains that Milton's poetry "transcends the original condition of its making" so absolutely that it cannot be "grounded in any meaning whatever, whether its original meaning or its later significance" (Labriola 1; Teskey...