The Heavenly Muse: A Preface to Milton

When A. S. P. Woodhouse died in 1964, he left incomplete the materials for this book. It was a project he had conceived as far back as 1942 and only realized in the form of separate essays and lectures published or delivered over the years. The essays and studies here have been judiciously edited by his colleague and former student Hugh MacCallum. This is a remarkably well-integrated sequence, clearly unified from within by Woodhouse's ripened judgment and the consistency of his approach to the whole of Milton's work. Woodhouse surveys chronologically the development from early through late poems, with intervening prose, while the backbone of the study is concerned with Milton himself--the experiences relevant to his work, the evolution of his ideas, the intellectual patterns evident in both prose and poetry; and the patterns of ideas in the poetry especially being related to Milton's life and to the aesthetic forms of particular works. Woodhouse brought to scholarship a great learning and exemplary critical gifts, which, directed at the study of Milton, have enriched our understanding of how the contexts of Milton's art give its expressions their forms and life.