Campbell and Corns's John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (2008) sent generative shockwaves through Milton studies by arguing that the young poet was a conservative Laudian. Bucking the assumption, most recently codified in Barbara Lewalski's 2000 biography, that the young Milton was a Puritan revolutionary in waiting, Campbell and Corns prompted stimulating, historicist-minded reevaluations of the religious politics of A Maske, “Lycidas,” and other early poems. Nicholas McDowell's new biography is deeply indebted to Campbell and Corns's paradigm-shifting work, but it is also unsatisfied with their mysterious image of Milton's radicalization, happening sometime between 1637 and 1641 for reasons we cannot fully know (and maybe shouldn't care too much about). The first in a planned two-volume biography, Poet of Revolution sketches a consistent narrative of Milton's intellectual development from roughly 1625 to 1642, de-emphasizing theology and denominational alliances in favor of “the educational, cultural, and literary principles which shaped his view of the world and of the place of the poet in it from an early age” (12).

Holding together the young and middle-aged Milton is one of the biography's primary leitmotifs: the daemon, an “intermediate between man and God, empowered to convey divine knowledge from the heavenly to the earthly realm” (14). As both a character in Milton's early poetry and a characterization of the young Milton's poetic ambitions, the daemon figures heavily in McDowell's revision of Campbell and Corns's claim that A Maske is the poet's “most complex and thorough expression . . . of Laudian Arminianism” (249). Milton was certainly not setting out to reform a courtly genre, but his Laudianism looks more like that of Joseph Mede, the internationally renowned general scholar who gave daily instruction at Christ's College when Milton attended from 1625 to 1632, who was denigrated by Laudians and Puritans alike for being too apocalyptic and too ceremonial, respectively. Mede wrote extensively of daemons, which may explain why, in both the Trinity and Bridgewater manuscripts of A Maske, the Attendant Spirit—the part played by Henry Lawes, composer of the masque's music—is described as a “Daemon.” For McDowell, A Maske is not so much an expression of Milton's Laudian Arminianism as it is the “high-water mark” of his “Platonic syncretism” (252), influenced by, but chafing against, the era's courtly Neoplatonism, as embodied in the work of prominent university poets like Richard Crashaw.

Unsurprisingly, “Lycidas” occupies a pivotal place in McDowell's picture of Milton's radicalization. Two chapters hone in on the elegy's two digressions, arguing that Milton understands Edward King's early death and England's corrupt prelacy as “different but linked threats to his ambition to become . . . the great Dantean scholar-poet” (298). The first digression, the intrusion of blind Fury with his shears, places poetic rewards in the afterlife, but its conclusion, with Apollo plucking the poet's ears, affirms Milton's dedication to the labor necessary to achieve poetic fame on earth. McDowell further explores this commingling of poetry's heavenly and earthly rewards in his discussion of the elegy's second digression: Saint Peter's invective against corrupt clergy. The poet construes King as a daemon by translating Lycidas into the “genius of the shore,” but King's trajectory of “becoming daemonic through virtuous and studious earthly existence” (329) mirrors Milton's life as an aspiring scholar-poet in the late 1630s. By adding the infamous headnote to “Lycidas” for its inclusion in the 1645 Poems, retrospectively claiming for the elegy the power of prophesizing the English clergy's downfall, Milton frames Saint Peter's digression as “the birth of [his] career as a public writer” (331) in 1638, known only to members of Cambridge's literary communities (the aforementioned Mede, Henry More, John Cleveland).

When, in 1642, a thirty-four-year-old Milton attached his name to The Reason of Church-Government, his fourth polemic against the bishops, McDowell convincingly suggests that it is the syncretic Platonic poet of Caroline England emerging as a political and religious revolutionary in a new context. The second volume of the biography, which will stretch from the divorce tracts to the final masterpieces, promises to situate Presbyterian tyranny as the chief impetus for Milton's defense of the regicide. Poet of Revolution leaves us in 1642, with Milton's (surprising) marriage to Mary Powell. What McDowell helps us recognize is that the Milton of the divorce tracts—harmonizing the carnal and spiritual dimensions of marriage through poetic prosing of the Eros-Anteros myth—and the Miltonic bard of Paradise Lost—confidently bringing Urania's celestial knowledge down to earth—are all daemons negotiating earthly history and divine providence. Whereas Campbell and Corns helped (and continue to help) scholars nuance their picture of Milton's religious politics, McDowell encourages us to think across the categories of religion and politics through a figure like the daemon. In combination with historicist reappraisals, transversal approaches like McDowell's will tap into our particular fascination with Milton as a poet of revolution.