How Milton Works. By Stanley Fish. Cambridge and London: Harvard Univ. Press [Belknap], 2001. Pp. 640. $35.

The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. By Barbara K. Lewalski Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Pp. xviii + 777; 18 plates. $39.95.

These long and long-awaited books present several similarities and contrasts by which a joint review might be organized. Let me start with what I take to be the most important, interesting, and obvious difference: Professor Fish writes as if Milton had no biography ultimately relevant to his texts (as Samuel Johnson would have liked to do), indeed, as if those texts constitute a rejection of biography; Professor Lewalski reads many of these same texts as one would read a bildungsroman, unabashedly charting Milton's literary output by the coordinates of his life and the social and historical pressures that shaped it. For Fish, Milton "works" by remaining steadfastly intransitive and producing no direct objects, by having nothing to do with mass and distance and movement, by refusing to serve time, and by remaining essentially obedient to a God who directs him to eschew the "external and diverting temptations" that some might call a life and a career.

Dennis Kezar
Vanderbilt University