Making Darkness Light, Joe Moshenska
Making Darkness Light, Joe Moshenska
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Making Darkness Light
A Life of John Milton

Author: Joe Moshenska

Narrator: Joe Eyre

Unabridged: 15 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 12/07/2021

Synopsis

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 times: 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

Goodreads review by Nancy on December 02, 2021

It’s been over forty years since I studied John Milton in an honors class at Temple University. While studying Milton, I bored people with all I was learning about him and his poetry. On the train ride home from Temple, I read his verse out loud; being a speed reader I had to slow myself down. I ass......more

Goodreads review by Jacky on January 12, 2022

In line with other Oxford academics such as Bart van Es, Marion Turner, Emma Smith, and Simon Palfrey, Joe Moshenska is commited to pushing the boundaries of literary criticism. Making Darkness Light is the latest of his attempts, and it is engrossingly successful. Moshenska's Milton is (rightly) a......more

Goodreads review by Mandy on December 28, 2021

I have never read or studied Milton, so can’t comment on the author’s claims in this wide-ranging and original approach to the great poet’s writing, but I certainly found it an enlightening and useful introduction to the work. It’s not a conventional cradle-to-grave biography, nor is it conventional......more

Goodreads review by Jason on October 23, 2021

This is a look at Milton that combines snapshots of significant points in his life with fictionalised embellishments and other asides . When it’s good it’s very good - the important political , religious and cultural contexts are nicely filled in ( the English civil war is the background here ) and......more

Goodreads review by Lynn on April 26, 2022

What kept me from giving this book one star is a section of about 100 pages 2/3 of the way through where the author gets out of the way long enough to actually tell you some interesting things about Milton's time and life. There are other brief glimmers of this scattered elsewhere in the book but yo......more

Quotes

“‘Making Darkness Light’...comes alive in its alert close readings.”—New York Times

“Tantalisingly different and new…an extraordinary, seductive work of intellectual imagination.”—Financial Times

“Moshenska, in 11 chapters, gives us 11 ways of looking at Milton, from the brilliant son of a musician father to the traveling polyglot (he visits Galileo in Tuscany) to the theological crank to the ferocious propagandist pamphleteer to the blind man sitting in his house, reeling off the staves of his great poem.”—The Atlantic

“Making Darkness Light is a visceral, mesmerizing book that will likely send you rushing headlong to read (or reread) Paradise Lost.”—The New Criterion

“Moshenska knows his way around Milton’s world… Making Darkness Light privileges us with a peek inside its author’s mind in contemplation of such a life and makes a compelling case that it could be told in no other way.”—Boston Globe

“Oxford University professor Joe Moshenska traces the 17th-century English poet’s life but also reflects on the profound effect of Milton’s work on Moshenska’s own life as a reader and a scholar. This revelatory biography is inventive, erudite, and personal.”—Christian Science Monitor, "10 Best Books of December"

“Moshenska makes light of Milton and his works as he traverses 11 crucial days in his life.”—The Times (UK)

“Joe Moshenska’s Making Darkness Light is unlike any book about Milton…richly inventive.”—The Sunday Times

"Of course, anyone looking for a deeper understanding of the facts of Milton’s life and the context for his poetry will certainly find what they’re looking for here. Making Darkness Light includes not only moments in Milton’s life and the landscape of 17th century England as well as close readings of his work. But it’s the exploration of what the author describes as one of Milton’s deepest occupations, “the place of literature in a life,” that sets the book apart. Moshenka has no aspirations to separate the biographer from the biography, and Making Darkness Light is richer for his presence throughout the book." —Jessie Gaynor, Lit Hub Senior Editor

“[Moshenska’s] sympathetic yet challenging account will undoubtedly win Milton new readers — and for that a chorus of Hallelujahs.”—The Spectator

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