In literary orbits, to dub someone “academic” is just about the worst thing you can say about him—it means obscurantist and politicizer, an obfuscation expert blind to the beauty, wisdom, and pleasure of imaginative literature, but keen on social agendas, on the isms so in vogue in recent decades. Every corner of the nation needed the overdue social spasms of the 1960s. Literature, however, did not. Literature has always been quite all right just as it is. The complexities and felicities of great fiction and poetry won’t be reduced by theory, but that didn’t keep untold English professors from donning French-made lab coats and smuggling Cultural Studies clichés into their seminars. Those profs attempted social reform by dismantling the canon and succeeded only in dismantling their own relevance.

The above narrative usually forgets to credit the multitude of English professors who every semester infect their students with a much-needed love of literature. Good ideas can come from inside the castellated academy, ideas that enhance rather than impede the pleasures of literature. One such idea came out of Berkeley in 1967: Stanley Fish’s book Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, a dynamo of scholarship that intervened in a long-standing debate about how to handle Milton’s tremendous masterwork.

Before Fish, Miltonists tended to join one of two brigades: Those who, after Blake, believed Milton to be in the devil’s back pocket, and those who, after C. S. Lewis, believed that Milton’s fealty was to God. Anyone can see that Satan is the beguiling hero-bard of Milton’s poem—he’s like a young Brando: You can’t take your eyes off him, and when he’s not on screen, you’re not happy. Milton’s Satan, Harold Bloom maintains, doesn’t speak poetry, he is poetry, a matchless embodiment of the poetical sublime, and not to find him enticing and enlarging “is simply to fail to be have been found by him.” God and his lackeys, on the other hand, come across as supreme dullards who nevertheless comport with what we know was Milton’s own worldview. Fish’s inspired feat was to fuse those brigades by essentially allowing them both to be correct. Satan is a seditious and inebriating heartthrob, yes, and God is a baffling bore, true; but that was Milton’s intent, to have us thinking just that and then catch ourselves in transgression, surprise ourselves by the sin of siding with the devilish insurrectionist and his legion of harmony killers.

To read Fish in Surprised by Sin and How Milton Works (2001) is to commune with a scholar in supreme control of the literature and his own attitudes toward it, a scholar thrillingly authoritative, wholly convinced, giddy with aptitude. This is heaven-sent talent, regardless of whether or not you’re partial to his assessments: You can’t hit the ball like Serena, and you can’t read Milton like Fish. For nearly 50 years, Surprised by Sin has shepherded students and lay readers into the momentousness and mastery of a poet whose only overall better is Shakespeare. When you write a book that forever alters the way we read the greatest poem in our language, you can take the rest of your life off. But Stanley Fish was just getting started.

To read all of Fish’s books in succession is a dizzying endeavor, and not because he is by turns entertaining and incisive and yawningly unintelligible, but because Fish isn’t only one Fish. Fish is, in fact, a whole school of Fish: Fish the Miltonist and theorist, Fish the lawyer and dean, Fish the columnist and cultural critic, Fish of the right and Fish of the left, Fish as Strunk and White, Fish the historian and film aficionado, Fish the religious commentator, Fish the philosopher and polemicist and pundit.