Tobias Gregory writes:

Why Milton Matters is strong on Milton’s reception, a subject to which Wittreich has already devoted several books. He knows the history of Milton criticism as well as anyone, and treats it as a lively conversation across three centuries, in which Dryden and Addison, Blake and Shelley, Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye trade insights with contemporary critics. Wittreich wears great learning lightly, and provides a salutary reminder that there is much worth remembering in older criticism; with the weight of Milton bibliography growing by the year, it’s easy to ignore anything written more than a quarter-century ago. The book is full of Milton references in modern literature and pop culture. Some of these, unfootnoted, invite scepticism: ‘Paradise Lost was the text the Hells Angels packed away in their hip pockets.’ I want proof. But Wittreich’s miscellany of modern references conveys a rich sense of Milton’s continuing presence in the English-speaking world, and shows that not everybody meets Milton on a reading list.

(LRB 6 March 2008)

Palgrave | hardback 253 pp. |ISBN: 9781403972293