MILTON AND HIS WORLD

Insofar as it treats more of Milton the ""unworldly idealist"", who engaged in political pamphleteering for the Cromwell government than of Milton the majestic poet, this excessively pictorial account is distortive. Nevertheless, it fulfills its own purpose more than adequately as a life-and-times-oriented survey, in which the copies of seventeenth-century documents, architectural drawings, and photographs of period costume indeed have place. The shallow, quite superficial outline of Milton's creative works is balanced by greater attention to his progressive political, religious, educational, and social views--though here too Wedgwood writes purely expositorily, without expanding on the-distinction of Milton's thought.: It's an austere if direct portrayal of a Renaissance imagination in conflict with a strictured era, drawn on a one-point perspective system ill-equipped to project the many facets of its noble subject.