Milton famously glossed Paradise Lost as having been conceived to “justify the ways of God to man.” “Justify,” moreover, meant anything but petty rationale. Rather the whole thrust of his Christian epic was to celebrate, in truth to revere, the great celestial design: Paradise, Adam and Eve, the Garden, and the Fall. The poem's literary footfalls would be as mighty as its verse-line, whether Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emily Brontë, or Tennyson, and for no author more so than for Herman Melville. Metropolitan New Yorker Melville may have been but he was also the querulous heir to the Atlantic seaboard's theology. Ever the wily, vigilant Victorian American searcher and doubter, his different feints at Christian writ thus seam all his writing, whether despite its South Seas armature, Typee, or assuredly Moby-Dick, “Bartleby,” The Confidence-Man, Clarel and, Billy Budd. Deservingly enough Hawthorne's succinct, and greatly savvy, journal entry of their discussion after they had walked the Southport sands together in November 1856 has become a presiding gloss. “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

The five essays which make up Melville & Milton, together with the reproduction of Meville's scorings and annotations of the Rev. John Mitford's Poetical Works, published in two volumes in 1836 by Hilliard, Gray, and Company, track a case of genuine intertextual flourish, the Milton silhouetted in Melville. In his short Preface John Bryant, who as editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies first invited Robin Grey to guest-edit a Melville–Milton issue (it appeared as a double issue in 2002), gives a nice breeziness to the connection – “Melville was one hell of a good reader of Milton.”

Bryan C. Short tackles the Miltonic Sublime in Melville, Ahab and Pip as one instance, but most of all the protagonist-Isabel relationship in Pierre. Did not Melville, for all the borrowings from Milton, or Longinus, or Addison, use his writer-prison narrative and its authorial “fool of truth,” Pierre Glendinning, as much to subvert as to celebrate the call to sublimity? Leslie E. Sheldon gives his focus to Moby-Dick, the verbal echoes of Paradise Lostin scenes like “The Symphony,” the Ahab of the gams and “The Chase – First Day,” and the Miltonic Satan as fated rebel re-figured in the Pequod's captain and no more so than at the ship's vortex-like sinking. Robin Grey does an incisive bit of tracking of Milton through Melville's Battle Pieces, the War in Heaven as given in Paradise Lost as underwriting Melville's own poetry of national fracture. In exploring the tacit presence of Milton in Clarel John T. Shawcross realights upon the great Melvillean trope of whiteness, two verse epics given over to the dialectic of God-given meaning or blank in the human cosmos. David V. Urban also considers Clarel but with an eye more to Samson Agonistes, the sacrificial figure of Samson finally able to recognize God's interventionist writ as against the student-quester Clarel's “recognition” only of deific silence.

Melville's different scorings and annotations are given in full, the lines, the x's, and the abbreviated commentaries from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained, “Lycidas,” Comus, “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” and the sonnets. One gets a marvellous unfolding sense, as one does with his Shakespeare annotations, of a radically alert mind responding to a necessary predecessor with full attention, the creative reader within (and intimately of a kind with) the creative writer.