Milton's early commentators-Henry Todd, Thomas Newton, Joseph Addison, and others-not only knew their classics well, they took them seriously as models of literary excellence and repositories of values. In the twentieth century, however, the classics have become mere "background." As a consequence, William M. Porter argues, not only is the foundational dimension of Milton's poetry now hardly visible, even to scholars, but the potential of Milton's poetry to revitalize the reading of the classics has been diminished. In this insightful study, Porter attempts once again to read both the...