Dustin D. Stewart
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198769774
- eISBN:
- 9780191822605
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769774.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Milton Studies, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter surveys revisionist appropriations of Paradise Lost developed by Whig poets and theorists in the wake of the Battle of Blenheim (1704). Resisting the scholarly tendency to draw a great ...
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This chapter surveys revisionist appropriations of Paradise Lost developed by Whig poets and theorists in the wake of the Battle of Blenheim (1704). Resisting the scholarly tendency to draw a great gulf between Milton and his immediate poetic successors, it argues that later writers continued to feel, as Milton felt, longing for an angel’s body. Such yearning became a feature of post-Miltonic blank verse. After first examining the Blenheim effect—Whig poets’ tendency to ascribe angelic strength to their military hero the Duke of Marlborough—the chapter considers spiritual verse that offers angelic potential to all devout souls. Here the preoccupation is less with angel warfare than with the ecstatic possibilities of angel sex. Unifying these two movements is Isaac Watts, whose hitherto underappreciated place in the history of blank verse this chapter emphasizes.Less
This chapter surveys revisionist appropriations of Paradise Lost developed by Whig poets and theorists in the wake of the Battle of Blenheim (1704). Resisting the scholarly tendency to draw a great gulf between Milton and his immediate poetic successors, it argues that later writers continued to feel, as Milton felt, longing for an angel’s body. Such yearning became a feature of post-Miltonic blank verse. After first examining the Blenheim effect—Whig poets’ tendency to ascribe angelic strength to their military hero the Duke of Marlborough—the chapter considers spiritual verse that offers angelic potential to all devout souls. Here the preoccupation is less with angel warfare than with the ecstatic possibilities of angel sex. Unifying these two movements is Isaac Watts, whose hitherto underappreciated place in the history of blank verse this chapter emphasizes.
