In his portrait of the artist as a school boy of twelve in the Defensio Secunda, Milton represented his younger self as undertaking a gruelling scheme of private study, rarely going to bed before midnight; his brother Christopher recalled to John Aubrey that the poor maid had to sit up for him ‘commonly till 12 or one aclock at night’ (quoted in R. Flannagan [ed.], The Riverside Milton [1998], p. 4). As part of this self-imposed reading programme, the youngster had evidently strayed beyond the set texts to consume Ovid's poetical works in their entirety. It has long been recognised that Milton's youthful book of Latin elegies provides an effective measure of his early enthusiasm for Ovid: ‘To write them’, E.K. Rand observed nearly a century ago ‘he must have known his Ovid virtually by heart’, not only the Metamorphoses, ‘but all the poems of Ovid’ (‘Milton in Rustication’, Studies in Philology 19 [1922], 109–35, 111).

Those readers who have recognised a relationship between Milton and Ovid have often accounted for it as an intense, but short-lived, attraction of opposites: Thomas De Quincey suggestively likened it to ‘the wedding of male and female opposites’ in which Ovid's ‘festal gaiety, and the brilliant velocity of his aurora borealis intellect form[ed] a deep, natural equipoise to the mighty gloom and solemn planetary movement in the mind of the other’ (The Collected Writings: New and Enlarged Edition, 14 vols, ed. by D. Masson [1890], vol. 11, p. 449). More recently K. has developed this analogy further by using Milton's own image of a lasting marriage as a happy union of ‘most resembling unlikenes, and most unlike resemblance’ to reflect the creative tension which characterised the relationship that endured between the two poets.

We have the testimony of Milton's youngest daughter Deborah that the Metamorphoses remained one of her father's favourite works, and Ovid's epic is widely acknowledged to be one of the most powerful imaginative presences in Paradise Lost. Like Ovid, Milton wanted his reader to ‘marvel at his creation non ex nihilo’ (p. xii), and many critics, myself included, have examined Milton's creative re-working of the Ovidian myth of Narcissus as a template for the birth of Sin and Eve's creation. K. goes further. In ‘Reflections of Narcissus’ (pp. 165–228) and ‘Self-Consuming Artists’ (pp. 229–84), she traces the far-reaching ramifications of this Ovidian tale within the poem, showing how essential it is for an understanding of all the main figures in the poem and how it is used, not merely ‘to flesh out the bare bones of the Genesis story and prove the general superiority of Christian myth’ (p. 47), but also to inform Milton's imaginative vision of the divine ‘origins of creativity’ together with its obverse, as good becomes evil in ‘a debased version of creative imitation’ and ‘degenerate[s] into sterile copying fuelled by the force of envy’ (p. xvii).

K.'s study persuasively demonstrates the extent to which Milton's reading of other works besides the Metamorphoses, particularly the Fasti and exilic poems, exerted a more deep-rooted influence on his entire poetic output than is generally acknowledged. By charting the richly complex transformations of Ovid's work in Milton's poetry from his youthful Latin elegies to Paradise Lost and beyond, K. ensures her claim that Ovid became ‘part of the fabric of Milton's thought’ (p. 326) seems convincingly conclusive.

Between the introduction and conclusion are four chapters. Following Milton's own practice in Paradise Lost, each is supplied with a prefatory ‘Argument’ as a guide to its contents. Though useful as abstracts, they cannot do justice to the complexity of her developing lines of thought that move in a spiral of progression, advancing then circling back to draw in other threads into the rich fabric of her argument. While K.'s focus is on Paradise Lost, to which she devotes two chapters, en route she engages closely with Milton's early works, bringing new insights to such relatively minor works as ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’, offering fresh vantage points on the Latin elegies and nuanced and perceptive readings of Comus. K. does discuss the later works: she contributes to the critical debate surrounding the close of Samson Agonistes, but does not linger long over Paradise Regained. As a coda, she circles back once more, this time to the Latin ode, Ad Joannem Rousium. ‘Go Little Book’ (pp. 319–27) reflects on Milton's preoccupation with his own reception and his position as a link in a continuing chain of metamorphic creativity: ‘If the poet's creativity originates in his reading and transforming of earlier writers, its survival depends on the later readers and poets who will equally interpret and use him’ (p. 287).

One of the more remarkable features of K.'s study is that it delivers so much more than its title seems to promise. As well as looking at Ovid's direct influence on Milton, K. suggests how Milton's poetics were defined against a backdrop of earlier experiments at ‘Englishing’ Ovid, not only in the work of major poets like Shakespeare and Spenser, but also in that of lesser known figures, like Thomas Peend and John Weever, whose erotic epyllia had been so popular in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. This perspective is timely. K.'s findings here will be complemented by two volumes devoted to Ovid in English (1480–1625), edited by S.A. Brown and A. Taylor, forthcoming in the valuable MHRA series, Tudor & Stuart Translations, which will make available such materials in readily accessible form. While K. extends our understanding of the mediatory role such earlier appropriations of Ovid played in the English Renaissance's reception of Ovid, we do lose sight of Milton at times. K. is well aware that some readers might be impatient with her approach, and, to those eager to press on, she urges a little ‘judicious skimming’ (p. xviii). However, it is well worth accompanying K. on these byways, which all ultimately lead us back to Milton and Ovid.

K. provides a courteous but discriminating critical synthesis of recent work on both poets, attentive to the interests of classicists as well as Miltonists. Her thoughtful discussion of Ovid's own revision of the past, and especially his relation to Virgil (‘Ovid and Virgil’, pp. 19–27), her reflections on the Fasti and its cultural context (‘Poet of the Year’, pp. 115–26) and her observations on ‘Ovidian invidia’ (pp. 242–51) are all of interest in themselves as well as for their bearing on the dynamic interchanges between Ovid and Milton. K. employs traditional close reading techniques to create and sustain her arguments; her study is enriched by detailed and often subtle and penetrating exegesis of the work of both poets. (For those with ‘small Latin and less Greek’ elegant translations are provided.)

K.'s book is an intricate, thought-provoking study, rich with detail and numerous flashes of brilliant insight. This is a scholarly and authoritative work, yet refreshingly free from the fumes of Palladian oil. Her lively and engaging manner ensures that both students and scholars alike will find her book a pleasure to read. This fine study is a major achievement and a significant contribution both to Milton criticism and to the history of the reception of Ovid, one that opens up many promising avenues for further exploration.