JOHN MILTON. PARADISE LOST, PARADISE REGAINED, AND SAMSON AGONISTES.

Introduction by RichardEberhart '26. Garden City: Doubleday &Company Inc., 1969. 395 pp. $5.95.

The introduction is brief, 13 pages. For a page and a half Mr. Eberhart quotes verbatim Henry B. Williams, Dartmouth Professor of English and Director of the Experimental Theatre, about his production of Samson Agonistes; and, verbatim, for two pages Douglas Bush on Milton's puritanism and William Empson on Milton's Christian thinking. Mr. Eberhart summarizes Milton's life in three pages and the contents of paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes in two Four pages take care of Milton's present position, influences on other poets, reasons for not using rhyme, and the benefits of studying Milton today. As a student at Cambridge University Mr. Eberhart used to walk "from St. John's to Christ's partiallarly to touch the tree that had been touched by Milton."

This reprint of an earlier edition is without apparatus or notes of any kind. Apparently the publishers were convinced that with a major contemporary poet as genial guide, lovers of poetry ignorant of Milton and freed from a learned introduction and notes may be delighted to be led by the hand that loved to touch the tree touched by the hand of Milton. When, indeed, Mr. Eberhart reminisces or when he discusses the popularity and craftsmanship of his fellow artists, he can seldom fail to be interesting.

One is sobered, however, by the assumption in the introduction that twentieth-century readers are so ignorant of Milton they must be given the most elementary information drastically compressed. If the publishers had encouraged Mr. Eberhart to write a purely critical essay, this might have been an edition with something new to offer.