Part of the Oxford University Press series Classical Presences, Maggie Kilgour’s new book addresses “the changing role of Ovid through Milton’s poetry” (xvi). Emphasizing the reading process of Milton and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers, Kilgour argues for the complexity they perceived in the ancient poet as well as their practice of making simultaneous references to classical authors and their later imitators. Kilgour sees Milton’s engagement with Ovid as a “creative revision” (xvii) that governs his representation of his most significant characters and his own life as an artist. She pursues this argument through five chapters, each beginning, like the books of Paradise Lost, with “The Argument” — a précis of the chapter — and following a clearly defined method: an examination of specific issues presented by Ovid; an account of other writers’ treatments of these issues, from classical to early seventeenth century; and a reading of particular works of Milton.

Her introduction emphasizes her departure from previous scholars’ works, rejecting Davis Harding’s allegorized, Christianized Ovid (1946) as well as Richard DuRocher’s decontextualized focus on the Metamorphoses (1985) in favor of a reading that places Milton among his contemporaries and immediate predecessors and includes attention to Ovid’s other works, notably the poetry of his exile. Through Milton’s engagement with both Ovid and the English Ovidian tradition, “intertextuality assumes the force of fate” (47). Kilgour devotes the next two chapters to Milton’s early poetry, with a focus on Comus. Chapter 1 reads these works in the context of such Ovidian writing as Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and The Rape of Lucrece; Spenser’s Faerie Queene, book 3; and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Chapter 2 presents two additional contexts: the literary world of early Stuart court masques, and Donne and the Cavalier poets; and Ovid’s Fasti. These chapters demonstrate how Comus becomes a “duel between Ovidian voices” (149) with a deliberately incomplete resolution.

Kilgour devotes her next two chapters, the most engaging in the book, to Paradise Lost. Chapter 3, “Reflections of Narcissus,” offers a perceptive and provocative reinterpretation of Milton’s allusions to the mythological character, who becomes a “model for creative change” (165, italics in original) and a representative of the artist, in whom self-knowledge, creation, and destruction are inextricable. The chapter also provides a fascinating re-reading of Eve as a complex sign of what could have been. Chapter 4, “Self-Consuming Artists,” examines Ovidian artist figures in Paradise Lost, arguing that “the artist himself has become the last and best example of the self-destructing nature of creativity” (230), and affirming the Miltonic importance of dialogue to the creative process. The conclusion focuses on Samson Agonistes as a reflection of Milton’s concern with his own posthumous reputation and a reading of Samson as an Ovidian figure who fails “to be reborn as a new kind of hero” (302).

Kilgour’s book resoundingly succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. It improves upon the work of Harding and DuRocher, while showing respect for their work. It provides an up to date emphasis on reading and offers sound and nuanced interpretations of Milton’s poetry. Kilgour’s style is supremely intertextual, as she engages the work of other scholars on nearly every page while never allowing the reader to forget her own line of argument. Readers will be pleased that her notes appear at the bottom of the page, and many will welcome her occasional interjections of dry humor. Scholars of both classical and early modern literature and advanced graduate students should find this book essential to study of Milton’s relationship to Ovid and other writers of antiquity.

Given the depth of her inquiry, it is perhaps unavoidable that Kilgour leaves unexamined some basic assumptions about early modern English educational practices. In particular, historians of rhetoric have shown that her ideas about what constituted rhetorical training, and the understanding of the nature of rhetoric itself, are far more problematic than she allows. Also, the study offers a well-executed but not truly new approach to Milton’s reading and creativity. It takes us much further on a familiar path. Still, this is an intelligent and challenging book that will reward the reader’s attention.