Making Darkness Light News Today

Samuel Johnson wrote famously of the poet John Milton’s 10,000-line signature work, Paradise Lost: “None ever wished it longer than it is.” The sheer length of this epic poem, together with Milton’s densely Latinate vocabulary and style and his 17th-century religious preoccupations — Adam and Eve, God and Satan — have made attacking the pages of Paradise Lost, or any other of Milton’s many works, a daunting proposition for most people today. Indeed, few college English departments ...

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

“Making Darkness Light,” a new portrait of John Milton by the Oxford scholar Joe Moshenska, presents the poet as a radical writer and thinker, incorporating literary analysis and personal history as well as a fictional dinner party.

A Booker Prize finalist based on a true story, essays from Siri Hustvedt, an imaginative biography of John Milton and more.

A new attempt to lace a Life of John Milton with imaginary events shows a lack of faith in facts