Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair: The Making of the 1645 "Poems".

Stella P. Revard. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997. xii + 299 pp. $44.95. ISBN 0-8262-1100-3.

When a new book appears on a poet already much written about, such as Milton, one may hope for two things: sympathetic understanding of the subject, and new insights or scholarly discoveries. Stella Revard produces both in her critical reading of Milton's 1645 Poems. One of her strengths is her knowledge of Classical Greek and Latin writers on whom Milton often draws. More importantly, she is well acquainted with Milton's Renaissance neo-Latin predecessors and contemporaries, about whose intertextual relationship with Milton relatively little has been said. As Revard puts it, "Classical poets gave Milton the basic models for his poetry; Renaissance poets showed him what he could do with those models" (5). Revard aims to study the poems both individually and as they relate to one another in Milton's carefully ordered collection. In particular, she aims to read the English and the Latin poems together rather than separately.

Not unexpectedly, her book joins the few that offer basic grounding in Milton's Latin poetry. Anyone wanting to come to grips with these poems might begin by turning to The Latin and Greek Poems, in A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. 1, ed. Douglas Bush (New York: 1970); then to the essays and bibliography in Urbane Milton: The Latin Poetry, in Milton Studies, 19 (1984); and finally to Revard's new book. In his invaluable, wide-ranging apparatus, Bush cites most of the classical and a few neo-Latin sources, but Revard goes further than Bush in showing how Milton's development of originally Classical genres, structures, and themes, as well as verbal echoes and images, was influenced by Neolatin intermediaries.

When she turns to the English poems, Revard enters a denser thicket of scholarship and commentary. Yet here, too, she gives us some original interpretations. For example, she suggests that the exorcism of Apollo in "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" represents Milton's announcement of "the eclipse of what Phoebus Apollo had come to stand for in his time" (66). Apollo is not only an ancient god, since Pope Leo X made the Apollo Belvedere a symbol of his reign (typifying Italian Renaissance syncretism), and James I and Charles I figured as Apollo in court poems, masques, and paintings. As another instance, Revard uses the Renaissance mythographers to reveal complex, constantly shifting interrelationships among the muses, sirens, nymphs, and other female deities that appear in such English poems as "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "Lycidas." Revard develops this investigation further in a chapter on "Sabrina and the Classical Nymphs of Water." Sabrina is often taken as a representative of Christian grace, but that grace is mediated through a Classical or Neoclassical figure. As Revard insists, "Sabrina belongs to a larger family of water deities . . . Ocean, Neptune, Tethys, and Nereus, deities who purify and by whom the magic of Comus and his potent parents Circe and Bacchus may be countered" (129).

Even so well-researched a book as this has its lacunae: Revard might have usefully cited E.R. Gregory's Milton and the Muses (Tuscaloosa, 1989) and a few additional essays on the Latin poems. But the important thing Revard contributes to an increasingly alatinate generation is a sense of how Renaissance poets moved comfortably between Latin and the vernacular without separating them by an unbreachable wall.

ANTHONY LOW New York University