... a strange but captivating, book. The author draws his reader, not only into the life and world of his subject, but into a sort of lived experience of Milton’s approach to poetry ... While every page shows the author’s learning, reading the book is a much more meditative than scholarly experience. Moshenska does not seem overly interested in facts and figures, still less with academic hobby horses. His focus lies elsewhere—in getting to the core sensibilities of the great English poet ... Moshenska unapologetically inserts himself into Milton’s story. He spends long passages recounting details from his research trips and his own experience with Milton’s poetry, both as a teacher and reader. Just as the many languages the poet mastered bubble underneath the rhythms of his verse, so too does Moshenska’s method float freely between different literary genres, and ranges widely over disparate periods of literary history. His roundabout method yields a strange animal of a book, a sort of hybrid creature—part biography, part literary criticism, and, in those sections where we follow the author on his research trips, part travelogue. The results are stunning in their insight, and oddly lyrical.

No sense of the merely dutiful constrains Making Darkness Light ... Moshenska takes as his chapter headings significant dates in the poet’s life, along with titles of his poems and phrases from his verse. They structure Moshenska’s account, which unfolds as a series of set pieces or freeze frames ... Bridging Milton’s double trajectory—as both a poet and a political and religious thinker—is one of the challenges a biographer must address. Moshenska does so in two ways. His first and less successful strategy, initiated in his introduction, is to pursue the idea that poor sight could have encouraged his subject to see through or beyond the quotidian ... More interesting is the way he brings both aspects of his subject’s life together under the rubric of writing ... several fictional passages...replace close readings of supporting evidence—from correspondence to household bills—as to what kind of man Milton may have been, and serve only to make us feel that the book is not so much a distillation of research as a self-portrait of the don as creative writer ... Making Darkness Light chooses the ground it highlights, and comes alive in its alert close readings. However, Moshenska’s use of fictional elements in his discussion of Milton’s life is less effective ... literary biography should be based on a scrupulous, trustworthy close reading of evidence both literary and biographical.

... unlike any book about Milton I have read. It is often densely erudite, but also richly inventive, and for quite long stretches it is, in effect,a historical novel. It records incidents that might have happened in Milton’s life, but did not, and it adds fictitious details when recording those that did ... The welcome aim of all this invention seems to be to make the book more colourful and attractive to ordinary readers, and perhaps for the same reason Moshenska includes more autobiography than you would expect in a scholarly tome ... avoidance of easy certainties is typical of this subtle, challenging book.

Making Darkness Light is billed as a 'biography' of Milton. Moshenska, professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, might be well placed to write the advertised biography. But this is something tantalisingly different and new: a personal exploration of what it is to read Milton, himself (until losing his sight) the consummate reader ... Moshenska, an Englishman who obtained his PhD at Princeton, allows himself 'impossible questionings and wild imaginings' on his subject, and the incessant intrusions of Moshenska’s own presence into this text often feel deeply American ... not so much an exercise in biography as a combination of memoir and of that most American of disciplines, Comparative Literature. In so far as we encounter a chronology of the life of Milton, it is as a series of vignettes that allow Moshenska to spend each chapter pondering a theme inspired by a domestic image of his hero’s life or a line of poetry ... The author’s self-indulgence should grate, and at times it does. To understand Milton’s musicality, do we need to learn exactly how Moshenska’s own sense of the physicality of piano practice was sharpened by breaking a finger while playing football with his young daughter? Nonetheless, Making Darkness Light emerges as an extraordinary, seductive work of intellectual imagination ... The author has the focused scholarly expertise to root this story in 17th-century detail, although he inevitably telescopes some controversial academic debates — the nature of humanist education, the definition of Puritanism — for the benefit of the general reader. Yet broadening his scope outwards to the big questions of literature as a genre, Moshenska still seems to have read everything, and knows exactly where to apply it.

Moshenska makes light of Milton and his works as he traverses 11 crucial days in his life. It is occasionally, in Moshenska’s words, 'too full of its author'; Moshenska never misses an opportunity to declare ostentatiously his distaste at the failings of Milton’s age, such as the brutality of his rigorous schooling, his chauvinism, his misogyny and even his alleged racism. Yet it would be harsh...to be overly critical of a brave study that offers much insight.

... a strikingly original biography ... Personal interjections from Moshenska are peppered throughout and add depth ... It’s less a by-the-books account of Milton’s life, and more like a poetic tour of 17th-century England as revealed by the manuscripts left behind by one of its most prominent writers. Literature lovers of all sorts will find something to savor here.

A prismatic portrait ... Moshenska takes a fresh perspective on John Milton (1608-1674), the art of biography, and the experience of reading to create a lyrical, meditative narrative about a poet who has seemed to generations of biographers and readers to be 'perennially contemporary' ... his captivating, perceptive study reveals a deeply felt connection ... With no aspirations to produce a definitive biography, Moshenska has crafted, instead, an incisive portrayal. An inspired biographical and autobiographical journey.