Nicholas McDowell's Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton, a new biography of John Milton, usefully modifies and at times corrects, but chiefly supports and completes the work of Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns in John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (2008). With his book, McDowell fills a specific gap in that biography by explaining how Campbell and Corns's essentially conventional, even Laudian, poet suddenly joined the radical reformist Root and Branch (367) religious movement of the early 1640s and eventually became Parliament's chief apologist for the execution of King Charles and later for Oliver Cromwell's government. In the process, McDowell critiques the totalizing approach of Milton biographies like Barbara Lewalski's The Life of John Milton (2002) and Christopher Hill's Milton and the English Revolution (1978) that cast Milton as a thoroughgoing Puritan from first to last. McDowell treats Hill's account of Milton as a lifelong member of the radical Puritan underground more belatedly and reservedly, but does not fully spell out the faults of either. Instead, he simply follows Campbell and Corns in downplaying grand narrative in favor of factual records of the poet's personal life and writings. The documentation added in this more accurate portrait is extremely welcome, although McDowell never tries to explain the failure of previous biographers (including Campbell and Corns) to credit post-1970s English civil war historians who invalidated the traditional account of the Puritan Revolution relied on by Lewalski, Hill, and innumerable others.

Despite minor objections, McDowell does not dispute that Milton's early life shows relatively conservative religious sympathies and an appreciation for Archbishop Laud's beauty of holiness, rightly noting that many who rejected his authoritarian interventions in church and state held similarly mixed attitudes toward the archbishop. However, McDowell's specific connections of Milton to future revolutionaries who employed a similar Laudian or baroque style are not convincing because the parallels drawn with Milton's poetics are slight, and he does not clearly define the style in question. Yet, McDowell successfully argues that Campbell and Corns wrongly claimed that the elder Milton joined a Laudian parish upon his retirement to the country, where his son soon joined him. Much more important overall, however, McDowell carefully details Milton's strong humanist education and corresponding liberal principles. This foundation is rightly credited to the great sixteenth-century Protestant educators and their successors, men such as Joseph Mede, John Hale, Launcelot Andrewes, and Milton's slightly older friend, Alexander Gil the younger. The outlook of this group and of Milton himself is shown to be far more comparable to the members of Great Tew than to any Puritan circle. Milton's Neoplatonism and interest in daemons s compared to the Cambridge Platonist, Thomas Jackson, although some concrete comparisons to Henry More and his circle (only briefly mentioned here) would have been useful, since Mede strongly disapproved of their apparently superstitious ancient ideas about nature spirits as pathways to knowledge. Yet, in general, McDowell provides an exceptionally strong portrait of Cambridge's literary and dramatic culture during Milton's residency, although without clarifying his crucial decision against the ministry and the resulting paternal conflict addressed in Ad Patrem.

McDowell is less strong on the poet's early years and omits some evidence that the Milton family may have disagreed with their conformable Puritan minister, Richard Stock, on the issue of usury, a considerable part of their income. On the influence of the young poet's Calvinist tutor, Thomas Young, McDowell follows Corns in placing Milton's Latin verse letter to Young in its educational context but restores some of Young's importance by claiming that Milton's “Letter to a Friend” is addressed to him, though that remains unproven. The more important point concerns McDowell's suggestion that Milton broke from Young and his fellow Smectyuuans before their denunciation of Milton's divorce tracts of 1642–1644, the cause cited by traditional biographies. Instead, he rightly argues that Milton's entire outlook clashed with their hard-core Calvinism, rigid anti-ceremonialism, and adamant anti-theatricalism. McDowell could have stressed this point further, along with identifying their specific differences on the role of elders in church government. On the theatrical issue, McDowell does show that Milton's 1638 masque is conventional rather than either reformist or Puritan, but fails to note that long before William Prynne reviled every aspect of stagecraft, Calvinists denounced the Catholic mass as a ceremonial play or performance, employing sensual allure without biblical precedent or evangelical substance. McDowell's citations of Milton's defenses of drama as a morally instructive medium are thus useful but not pointed enough. Other vitally important divergences between them are insufficiently noted, so that in the end, McDowell's qualifications to both the traditional (Lewalski and Hill) and the newer (Campbell and Corns) narrative do not fulfill their initial promise. The enduring conundrum of why Milton even temporarily supported Young's Calvinist faction remains as unsolved as ever.

As McDowell concedes, even Milton's initial treatise Of Reformation (late 1641) ignores or dissents from this faction on major doctrinal issues (321), while his slightly later condemnation of their renewal of pre-publication censorship (Areopagitica, 1644) soon sealed their rupture. Yet in fact, this tract's anti-Calvinist and even anti-denominational free will theology was already apparent in the 1638 masque, which is ably covered but without crediting the humanistic reevaluations produced by other recent scholars. Such omissions grow greater as the book proceeds. By too exclusively citing Stock and Young as Milton's earliest influences, McDowell oddly overlooks his headmaster at St. Paul's School, the liberal theologian Alexander Gil the elder, who may have influenced his free will principles. McDowell also sees Areopatica through a similarly narrow lens, mentioning its praise for the Hebraist John Selden but completely omitting Francis Bacon, who is cited there twice, and whose strong, semi-mystical reinterpretation of universal learning is never mentioned. Also omitted is Milton's fellow Platonist, the supposedly martyred Lord Brooke (who did not actually die in battle), and whose “Of Truth” Milton almost certainly knew. No obvious explanation for these gaps comes to mind, but they contribute to the larger problem of McDowell's failure to find any reason for Milton's sudden radicalization beyond his friendship for Young, to which McDowell adds reverence for the usual puritan heroes, the supposed martyrs Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne—none of whom Milton mentions except Prynne, pejoratively, and none of whom lost their lives.

McDowell partly compensates by detailing some of the young Milton's Italian republican sources, particularly Dante and Petrarch, although he inexplicably avoids the term republican and slights both Machiavelli and Paolo Sarpi, the lifelong, priestly advocate of a free Republic of Venice. More surprisingly still, McDowell completely omits Milton's own claim in Areopagitica that he was radicalized by his Italian friends abroad who urged him to return home and fight for the liberty they had lost to the Inquisition, notably after the Galileo affair prominently mentioned here ended with the astronomer's house arrest. These Italian humanists remained committed to Galileo's views despite stiff papal opposition and censorship. They also testified to the poet's impressive expertise in science and mathematics in letters and poems published with Milton's 1645 Poems but rarely included in modern publications. It might be said that their prophecies for this new Virgil or Dante were finally and triumphantly fulfilled in Paradise Lost, as were the mythic, Neoplatonic speculations of Milton's youth. These facts suggest that there is still much work and rethinking to be done despite the appearance of this very learned and helpful new biography, which points in many directions that need to be pursued in the future.