Review of David Hawkes' "John Milton: A Hero For Our Time"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, which an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This biography, written for the 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth, is a rather mediocre offering, and hardly worth being associated with the great poet’s name. Hawkes argues, rightly I think, that Milton’s perennial encounters with religious strife and political contretemps should have us embracing him as a contemporary, not as an austere figure of worldly timelessness. Milton was a world-class heterodox: he ceaselessly questioned the authority of institutions (including the English monarchy), wrote jeremiads against human obsequiousness and psychological idolatry, and led a far-from-ordinary family life. 

Hawkes’ continued interest in Milton’s life derives from his interest in iconoclasm in all forms, and Milton’s active embrace of it. One of the few strong points of this book is the author’s willingness to look at the important texts other than just “Paradise Lost.” The pamphleteering, including the “Areopagitica,” is paid due consideration, and Milton’s advocacy of divorce and unfettered freedom of speech strike us as ultra-modern even four centuries later.

Unfortunately, Hawkes seems to be too invested in ideological concerns that I imagine would barely have consumed any of Milton’s attention. He inevitably wants to connect everything to usury (that is, the practice of loaning out money for a profit, which was a relatively new practice in Milton’s time). Milton’s father was a usurer, and this fact is somehow used to interpret, in a bizarre, anachronistic mixture of Freudianism and Marxism, many of Milton’s motivations. While Milton might have had many opinions that put him out of the mainstream, he is very much a member of the seventeenth century when it comes to his opinion on this: usury means making an idol out of money, when the only thing we should make an idol out of is God himself. 

Hawkes also makes reference to Nietzsche at least twice in the book, one time saying that he “fatuously preferred evil” (p. 185). I found this ignorance to be surprising from someone who apparently works at an American university. Nietzsche already suffers from enough willful misinterpretation at the hands of people who know plenty about him than to incur this. And if he’s saying this stuff about Nietzsche, what is he getting wrong about Milton, a figure with whom I’m even less familiar?

Milton is the indispensable poet, both for his time and for ours. This biography, however, can easily be skipped – and should be. It’s amazing how this was, according to the cover, made the “Booklist Top Ten Biography Pick.” While I have yet to read either of these, I do have two more Milton biographies – Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns’ “John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought,” and Anna Beer’s “”Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot.” A quick perusal shows both of them to be far superior to Hawkes’ book, and I look forward to reading them in the future.