Milton and maternal mortality /

This valuable book will prove to be of much greater interest than its narrow title might suggest. Schwartz (Univ. of Richmond) looks at Milton's experience of childbed suffering as the poet would have known it from his culture in general, and his marriages in particular, and demonstrates how the writer's major compositions reflect feelings of "male reproductive guilt." For example, in "On Shakespeare" (an early poem), Milton "implicitly claims that no experience other than the self-annihilation faced by a woman who seeks to do God's will ... in childbirth can quite capture the danger a young poet faces in setting out to imitate his elders." At the heart of this study, of course, lies Milton's last sonnet ("Mee thought I saw my late espoused saint"), one of the supreme poems in the English language, which Schwartz illuminatingly reads in counterpoint with the presentation of Eve in Paradise Lost. Schwartz's approach to the puzzling allegorical figure of Sin in the epic also proves fruitful, though his comments on cosmology perhaps ride the thesis a bit hard. With its combination of historical imagination and insightful literary interpretation, this study will benefit all students of Milton. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. E. D. Hill Mount Holyoke College