Even the most seasoned Milton scholar, one suspects, must feel overwhelmed at times by the sheer erudition required to process the vast body of knowledge that Milton himself possessed. Paradise Lost alone is so encyclopedic in its scope—a wide-ranging compendium of countless forms, genres, facts, histories, ideas, and entire bodies of knowledge—that one is bound to be daunted by the fatigue the poem inevitably induces in anyone who attempts to understand, or even simply to survey, its intellectual background. When one adds to the picture all of Milton's prose and his other poetry, it is anyone's guess as to how a scholar of his work can ever muster up the resources to complete a project capable of doing justice to his commanding intellect. How lucky we are, then, to have William Poole's Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost to help guide the way. In this deeply learned and lucidly written book, Poole provides a useful and compelling portrait of “Milton as a reader and scholar” (xii), demonstrates how Milton amassed the learning that went into the composition of his most famous poem, and, in the process, makes this most ambitious of early modern poets accessible to his modern readers.

In the very first sentence of his preface, Poole identifies such accessibility as his primary goal and modus operandi. It is clear from the outset, then, that he intends this book not only for a “community of experts” (xii) but for a much more general audience as well. As a consequence, some specialists within the academy might fault the book for its overall lack of engagement with, and the absence of a clear and forceful contribution to, the central and often fervent debates raging in Milton studies. Yet the great virtue of Poole's study, I believe, is that it offers professional Milton scholars no shortage of valuable insights as well. Indeed, unlike the authors of many other books on Renaissance literature intended for an audience of nonexperts, Poole never sacrifices rigor and never rehashes stale commonplaces. Experts, no less than more general readers, have much to gain from reading this absorbing study.

Like Poole's earlier book Milton and the Idea of the Fall (2005), this one is organized into two large sections. The first offers a thorough intellectual biography of Milton, covering his earliest education up to the composition of Paradise Lost, while the second part engages in an intensive analysis of Paradise Lost itself. Such a structure is an accurate reflection of the book's overall format: Poole characterizes the study as a “biography-of-a-poem hybrid,” one that is “partly biographical and partly critical” (xi). One might quarrel in part with this way of organizing the book on the grounds that it seems to create an arbitrary and thus unnecessary division between context and text, but Poole works around that potential problem by carefully drawing clear connections between the two halves of his book. For example, while offering an account, in part one, of Milton's interest in and encounter with Galileo, Poole proleptically signals Galileo's relevance to Paradise Lost (41), a discussion that pays off in his later, more thorough discussion of the poem's engagement with the new astronomy (186–89). Such links create helpful coherence among the parts of the book, allowing Poole's project to be more than the sum of its parts and giving it an advantage over many other introductions to Milton, which tend to take the form either of biography or of textual analysis but rarely both (at least not in any sustained way).

Poole's sharp reading of Paradise Lost on offer in part two contains some striking analyses of the poem's language and offers some fresh, unexpected interpretative insights. Yet the exegesis of the poem also has the tendency to cover often-discussed aspects of Paradise Lost (such as the Galileo connection, to take one example) in ways that might put off the readers of this journal, although surely more general readers and students will undoubtedly find his discussions of Paradise Lost worthwhile, especially in the classroom (the relative brevity of the chapters make them manageable enough to be assigned in an undergraduate course).

But it is really in part one, and particularly in his accounts of Milton both as a student and as a teacher, that Poole's talents and contribution are most evident. For instance, his account of Milton's grammar-school education at St. Paul's under Alexander Gil père et fils leads to a fascinating discussion of the impact of the Thirty Years’ War on Milton's earliest poetry. With painstaking thoroughness and in impressive detail, Poole also patiently limns the peculiar contours of Milton's own curriculum, offering insights that are (at least to this reviewer) genuinely interesting and surprising (and aided by a helpful appendix that includes Milton's syllabus). To account for the absence of historiographical writing from Milton's curriculum, for example, Poole proposes that “Milton knew how important and how dangerous history could be,” to the extent that the relative exclusion of history is “consistent with [the] ethical seriousness” that marked Milton-the-teacher's pedagogical ambitions (65).

All in all, scholars looking for a Grand Unified Theory of Milton or a bold plunge into the raging currents of Milton studies could very well be disappointed by what Poole provides in Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost. It would be more than a shame, however, if professional academic critics were to dismiss the book entirely. The book's impressive profusion of local insights, historical details, patient analyses, and convincing inferences makes it poised to speak to experts and nonexperts alike—a task that few academic scholars working today are able to accomplish at all, let alone with the grace and clarity that Poole's book puts on display.