Search Results

This chapter considers three key assaults on the Ancien Régime: those of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century; the American colonies at the end of the 18th; and the French citizenry, from the assault on the Bastille to the rise of Napoleon. In each case, an imitation of the Aeneid develops into an effort to come to terms with rapid political and social change. In the case of Paradise Lost, John Milton produced a poem that reveals all the complexities of the Restoration and his efforts to find a place within it, while in the case of the Columbiad, the production and revision of the poem show how Joel Barlow succeeded in creating an epic that articulates the values of a new revolutionary society. The third poem, the little-known Virgile en France of Victor Alexandre Chrétien Le Plat du Temple, makes the Aeneid, traditionally seen as a pro-imperial poem, into an allegory of the establishment of the French republic.

This chapter argues that Milton's Paradise Lost represents the ‘grateful digressions’ (8.55) of unfallen Adam and Eve, like the angels' labyrinth dances and mazes of Paradise as examples of heavenly order, in contrast to Satan's unswerving line of hateful pride. Sensitive to the pressures on the psyche created by voices entering the brain through the ever-permeable folds of the ear's labyrinth and their potential to affect ones own voice and ability to hear the divine within, Milton dramatizes through Eve a process of falling into self-knowledge; from her first delight with the world's reflecting surfaces and first experience of having her vision corrected at her ear, she falls through inexperienced, shallow self-reflection toward the bottom of despair before reaching an experience of deepest reflection. Eve's voice of penitence sounds the depths of her fallen knowledge; ventriloquizing all of the voices Milton suggests the difficulty of finding ones own.

Paradise Lost faces the challenge of creating, organizing, and governing worlds. Yet Milton rejects the epic’s favorite topic, imperial desire, fully embracing the cosmological turn initiated by Camões and Spenser. He treats “the world” from both natural philosophical and theological perspectives, as he interrogates competing accounts of its creation. Offering a revisionist analysis, this chapter shows that Miltonic theodicy intervenes in debates over contemporary theories of the world, particularly competing visions of the world as a divinely created or humanly produced artefact. It investigates Milton’s engagement with the Lucretian challenge to theistic creation, his use of the tradition of the cosmographic meditation, and his engagement with a new global cartographic consciousness to show how the epic comprehends almost all the genres of worldmaking discussed in this book. The poem stages symbolic internalizations of the world and concludes that moral self-making is the only meaningful source for the world’s renewal.

This chapter examines the elaborate diffusion of ineffable presences in the monist materialist universe of Paradise Lost. It analyses the various poetic strategies Milton uses to assert his putative ability to say the unsayable while simultaneously allowing the poetic imagery and tone of the poem to suggest that such feats are merely imagined. This opens up to important questions about the poem's implied theory of accommodation, and leads to a more detailed analysis of ineffable ‘speech effects’ in the poem, where Milton first deploys and then subverts apophatic imagery in the process of evoking the otherworldly character of divine, angelic, demonic, and prelapsarian speech. This analysis sheds light on the poem's sustained meditation on the ineffable encounter with the divine as an interiorized spiritual experience, where God's creatures, whether they are fallen angels or fallen man, must contend with the emerging silence that is the consequence of divine privation.

This chapter looks at book 3 of Paradise Lost, which sets apart an invisible God and heaven from the visible universe, divine light from sunlight. Book 3 points to a contrast between the internal illumination invoked by the blind poet and an Apollonian solar inspiration that motivates the poetry of paganism. In the episode of the Paradise of Fools, the book further criticizes—with a particular eye toward Catholic practice—the tendency of men and women to read back through analogy from God's and their own visible works to the invisible Creator, and to confuse the two. Yet, in distinguishing God's lower works from God and his heaven, Milton knows that he risks unlinking creation from Creator altogether, as do the book's alchemical philosophers, and as Satan does when he later suggests to Eve that the sun, not God, is the power source that gives life, as well as light, to the universe.

This concluding chapter examines the structure of the composite books 11 and 12, in which the prophesied destruction of Eden corresponds, antithetically, to the building of Pandaemonium at the beginning of Paradise Lost in book 1. After the Fall, Eden might become a temple, oracle site, a grove of pagan rites, goal of pilgrimage—it has already, at the moment that Satan invades it in book 4, been compared to the sheepfold of the Church, prey to thieves, a Church too rich to escape corruption. In books that predict the rise of empires, God dissociates his cult from power and wealth, closing down and eventually washing away Eden, lest it become another Pandaemonium—a haunt of foul spirits.

Chapter 3 looks at L’Homme qui rit (1869), a work set in late- and post-Restoration England that, like Les Travailleurs de la mer, reveals Hugo’s extraordinary rhetorical and visionary powers. The heightened, almost hallucinogenic atmosphere of L’Homme qui rit presents an image at once dystopian and utopian of human potential. The novel complicates, enriches, and extends the almost coded language and historical concerns of the earlier narratives—an all-encompassing verbal network that testifies not only to Hugo’s globalizing vision but also to his extraordinarily ambitious artistic and social agenda. Hugo’s concern with his literary and political legacy indicates an abiding fear that he might well die while still in exile. Through its engagement with John Milton’s Paradise Lost, L’Homme qui rit offers a singular strategy for perpetuating Hugo’s fame in the literary afterlife

This chapter focuses on book 2 of Paradise Lost. In book 2, Milton continues the story of the demilitarization of the fallen angels and of his epic more generally when he bases all of its action around the figure of Ulysses, the hero of eloquence and fraud, whose own epic comes in the aftermath of the Trojan War. The chapter demonstrates that the Odyssey, imitated and parodied in Satan's voyage through Chaos to God's newly created universe in the book's last section, is just one of the classical stories about the career of Ulysses that Milton evokes as models for its different episodes. The various parts of book 2 are held together by this pattern of allusion, as well as by the Odyssean figures of Scylla and Charybdis, the emblem of bad choices, or of loss of choice itself.

This chapter assesses John Milton's Paradise Lost as a source for graphic satire. The many graphic satirical parodies of Paradise Lost disclose the workings of two different political readings of the poem, readings that respectively function to attenuate and foster rather different conceptions of the Miltonic sublime. The first, and more familiar, regards Milton's epic as an anti-Whig allegory that warns readers of the dangers of opposing the constitutional authority of the sovereign. In contrast to this reading of Paradise Lost, one that looks to it as a political allegory of and for the present, a different and still more complex approach to the poem emerges in a number of James Gillray's mature caricatures. In a manner that is highly idiosyncratic, Gillray seems less interested in conscripting Milton's text as a cautionary tale of rebellion and more concerned with exploiting the generic peculiarities of Paradise Lost for satirical and political effect.

This chapter shows how book 1 of Paradise Lost metaphorically depicts the role of the devil in raising the rebel angels out of their “bottomless perdition,” an act of poetic creation analogous to the divine creation of the universe described in the invocation—“how the heavens and earth/Rose out of chaos.” The chief devils described in the catalog that occupies the center of book 1 and organizes its poetic figures and symbolic geography—Carthage, Sodom, Egypt, Babel-Babylon, Rome—are precisely those who will come to inhabit the pagan shrines that human idolatry will build next to or even inside the Jerusalem temple, profaning God's house. This catalog—whose traditional epic function is to size up military force—instead suggests the force of spiritual falsehood, and it corresponds to the defeated devils' own reluctance to pursue another direct war against God; they would rather resort to satanic fraud.

The chapter explores how Milton's epic poems express a vision of tolerance that is critical of secularism. Though committed to a procedural principle of toleration, the imaginative visions of tolerance in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are limited in scope when compared with English and Continental contemporaries. Through literary and linguistic analysis, the chapter looks to Milton's various representations of topics relevant to toleration thinkers (e.g., community, the natural world, Satan, debate, freedom of conscience, the Divine), and judges Milton's epics to be interested in freedom of thought or tolerance not as goals in themselves, but as means to an ultimate end: belief and the triumph of the invisible church.

This chapter uses a close reading of connected passages in Paradise Lost to reassess the nature of Milton's angels and to assert the value of associating imaginative angels with theology and natural philosophy. In contrast to Heywood's and Hutchinson's, there is a peculiar intensity in Milton's representation of angels. This is in part because of his strong view of accommodation, and in part because of his inspiration. The discussion here also offers and rejects a species of historicist reading that used Milton's political life as a key for understanding Abdiel's actions. The answer to whether Milton can represent an unfallen angel feigning resides in theology and in poetry, together. In the integration of story and doctrine, one finds that Milton's engagement with his communicative environment, and his ability to absorb these materials and tell a story self-sufficient enough to speak angelology and poetry at the same time.

According to Joseph Wittreich, Romantic poets empowered Milton by making him whole again through their readings of his poetry in the future tense, so that poems emerging from one moment of crisis could reflect upon and explain another crisis in history when, once again, terror and tyranny overruled. In the Romantic period, it became a commonplace to link the prophetic Milton to the Romantic poets. This chapter discusses Milton and the Romantics. It examines the Romanticist readings of Paradise Lost and its influence in the writings of the Romantic poets. The chapter examines his tradition of prophecy and oppositional rhetoric, which found its way into the works of the Romantics.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667). Paradise Lost tells the story of two falls. There is the unending fall of Satan and his followers, and there is the Fall—and spiritual regeneration—of Adam and Eve. Satan's story is the old epic dispensation, the search for temporal power as a zero-sum game driven by envy and the desire for glory above one's peers. It can only culminate in kingship, war, and destruction—and in alienation from God in a literal or mental hell. The fall of Adam and Eve tells the story of the new dispensation of Milton's epic: of how love between human beings, here exemplified in marital love, enables the love of God; of the experience of spiritual goods that exceed finite temporal ones; of hope for an existence beyond the finitude of death.

Chapter 3 argues that the failure of the Revolution deepened Milton's reading of Ovid. In Paradise Lost, the act of revision enables Milton to approach the problem of political change. By working within traditions, with stories and figures whose fates are already well known, Milton is able to explore the limits of freedom and change. The use of the figure of Ovid's Narcissus especially demonstrates the problem of free will and determination. While critics have noted the presence of Narcissus as a subtext for the stories of Sin and Eve, Ovid's episode is central to the poem as a whole. Showing first that Ovid's story is a central statement about the nature of desire and creativity, this chapter follows its adaptation in Elizabethan literature, and then shows how Narcissus and related stories, such as those of Daphne and Pomona, help Milton understand creativity and its relation to change.

In 1660, upon the Restoration of Charles to the English throne, John Milton went into hiding. His treatises Eikonoklastes and Defensio were condemned and burned. Milton faced the prospect of public execution, but escaped with a brief imprisonment. Three-quarters of a century later, the Milton once vilified for his political polemics was embraced by the public for his verses, which had risen high in England's favour. This chapter discusses Milton's purposes and priorities. The ideal of teaching is, according to Milton, through the ‘delight’ of poetry; for him poetry must function to deplore the general Relapses of Kingdoms and States from justice and God's true worship. Just as with poetry, he looked at prose to instruct the readers by affording them delight, and by calming the perturbation of mind that can impede their reception of truth. Milton believed that just as poetry can impart virtue through charm and smoothness of sounds, prose draws on eloquence to charm the multitude to love what is truly good. In his writings, he pursued the conception of liberty, the strife between good and evil, the principle of free choice, and the sinfulness of the popery. Milton tailored his Restoration poems as bulwarks against the wickedness of the court and nation. His poems served as sharp checks and sour instructions, in the absence of which, many people would have been lost if they were not speedily reclaimed. Some of Milton's works of enlightenment and corrections were Paradise Lost, The Reason of Church Government, and History of Britain.

This chapter argues that Paradise Lost continues to engage in imaginative ways with early modern debates over the nature of heresy, blasphemy, schism, and toleration. The chapter juxtaposes Milton's great poem not only with anti-heretical writings from the revolutionary decades and from the Restoration, but with Milton's last major pamphlet, Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, and Toleration (1673), since both works are engaged in their own different ways in rethinking the meanings of heresy and schism in the context of heated debates about toleration. Paradise Lost imaginatively revises cultural constructions of heretics, blasphemers, and schismatics. By giving Satan qualities associated by orthodox heresy-makers with subversive, cunning, and theatrical heretics, Milton remains engaged in the war over heresy, blasphemy, and schism that had divided and unsettled the religious world of his England and continued to do so during the years of religious conflict in the Restoration.