LAURA LUNGER KNOPPERS (ed.). The Complete Works of John Milton, Volume II: The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes

Abstract

For the past two decades, Laura Knoppers has built a deserved reputation as a first-rate practitioner of new historicism in the analysis of John Milton’s writings. In the present book, the first-released volume of the anticipated eleven volumes of The Complete Works of John Milton (Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell, general editors), Knoppers uses her new historicist expertise to shed considerable insight upon the 1671 poems and the multifaceted historical context in which they were composed and published. Because Knoppers’s lengthy introductory material provides the vast majority of her volume’s critical insight, it will be the main focus of this review. Knoppers begins her General Introduction by sharing the observation of the royalist clergyman John Beale, shortly after the late 1670 publication of the so-called 1671 poems, that Milton’s poetry could be as politically charged and dangerous as his prose. Knoppers’s implicit agreement with Beale’s assessment becomes increasingly evident as her essay unfolds, and she takes pains to situate the 1671 poems within the politically charged atmosphere of contemporary England.