Eden Renewed: The Public and Private Life of John Milton

This is probably not the best book for someone new to Milton's work or his life. Despite the subtitle, Milton's complicated family affairs are mentioned only in passing and his equally tortuous political writings are examined mostly for what they reveal about his style. (""We need not examine carefully his State letters,"" Levi announces, ""they are of value to historians, but to students of Milton they demonstrate only the linguistic ability we knew he had.""). That said, the book is still great fun. Levi brings to his subject that opinionated, slightly cantankerous, self-assured tone that one associates with the elder statesmen of British academe (think A.L. Rowse), a tone that is welcome corrective to today's excruciatingly cautious, relativized and anesthetized tomes. He is at his best in his extremely personal critical examination of Milton's work, bringing to bear everything he knows as a classicist, Oxford professor of poetry, translator, archeologist, biographer of Shakespeare and Tennyson and all-around smart fellow. Levi seems perfectly suited to Milton: his command of poetic forms is absolute, making him a perceptive commentator on a poet so immersed in his art that he could play with its rules and patterns without losing its spirit. Levi even takes it upon himself to improve a couple of lines of Paradise Lost where he perceives that ""someone taking dictation, or the poet himself giving it, had nodded off and made unmetrical nonsense."" For readers already familiar with Milton's life and times (perhaps through William Riley Parker's two volume Milton, with which Levi does not, however, always agree), this would be a fine supplement. (May)