John Milton [1608-1674]
Title: Milton, Power, and the Power of Milton
Author: Yale Courses
Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf91LApkCpU
For
a vast number of complicated reasons, Milton has invited for 350 years now, a
uniquely violent response to the particular question of his value as a poet. And the violence of this reaction is due in
large to a tendency to think of Milton, and of Milton’s work, in terms of the
category of power. So I have given this
first lecture a title, the title being “Milton, Power, and the Power of Milton”
because any introduction to Milton has to confront the longstanding conviction
in English letters of Milton’s power or his strength as a poet and it is
practically impossible to begin a reading of Milton without the burden of
innumerable prejudices and preconceptions.
Milton’ reputation always precedes him and in fact that has always been
the case. Even in his lifetime. And even if we have heard of nothing of
Milton the poet or nothing of Milton the man, we’re certainly of course likely
to have heard of Adam and Eve and the story of the Garden of Eden. So it is especially difficult to read
Paradise Lost without bringing to it some sense of the power of the religious
problems the theological and the ethical problems that that story seems so
powerfully to set out to address.
Now
readers of English Literature talk about Milton very differently from the way
they talk about other writers.
Historically, it has not been a pleasure, or wit, or beauty that have
been associated with the experience of reading Milton. Those are the categories of value we tend to
associate with or affiliate with our other favourite writers, writers as
diverse as William Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf for example. But in our collective cultural consciousness,
if there is such a thing, whether we like him or not, we tend to think of John
Milton as powerful and reasons for this coupling of the name Milton and of this
idea or the metaphor of power are worth looking into.
Power
is a conceptual category that Milton brooded on and cultivated his entire
writing life. From a very early age,
Milton nursed the image of himself as a powerful poet. We have in Milton, a man who was able to state
categorically in his early twenties that the epic poem, that he would not begin
writing for another 25 years, would become an unforgettable work of English
literature. Milton anticipated and
lovingly invested all of his energy in his future literary power and future
literary fame. He anticipated this power
much as his father, the reasonably well-to-do banker might have anticipated
long term earnings from a particularly risky business venture. And in Milton’s case, this investment in
power paid off. Milton would eventually
come to feel so comfortable with the mantel of power that he was able to do
much more than simply rewrite the first two books of the Bible which of course
was one of the things that he accomplished in Paradise Lost. That is itself no mean undertaking. By the end of his life, Milton would in
effect try to rewrite everything. After
he published all of his major poems, he began publishing a spate of works that
attempted to recreate British culture from the ground up. He invented his own system of philosophical
logic. He published a treatise he had
written earlier on grammar, inventing his own system for the understanding and
the learning of the Latin language. He
wrote a long and detailed history of Britain, attempting to create the meaning
of that little island that he always assumed was God’s chosen nation. And finally, and probably for Milton the most
important, Milton wrote a theology inventing in effect, his own religion. And Milton’s Protestantism looks like no-one
else’s before or since. There’s a real
sense in which Milton wanted to recreate all of western culture in his own
image. And regardless of what we think
of the success of that example, or the appeal of the attempt to do such a
thing, the amazing thing is that Milton felt so empowered even to embark on
such an enormous project. And readers of
Milton ever since have had to confront not just Milton’s writing but this
unspeakable sense of empowerment that underlies just about everything that
Milton writes. It seems that a useful
introduction to the poetry of Milton would be a look at some of the various
types of power that Milton imagines in his work and some of the types of power
that literary history have tended to confer upon Milton the man, the image of
Milton the man and Milton’s writing. Now probably the form of power that we
readily associate with John Milton involves his position at the dead centre of
the English literary canon. Milton is –
this goes beyond questioning – he’s an object of worship by British and
American institutions of higher education.
Adam & Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden
It
would be utterly inadequate to account for this institutional, surreal institutional
power that Milton holds over us by stating blandly that Milton is the greatly
English poet. That is the easy answer
and of course is not untrue. But we can
anatomise some of the forms of power that have been most commonly attributed to
this greatest English poet. There is
first the understandable aesthetic power, the power of beauty of Milton’s verse;
an aesthetic power that is often thought or felt to inhere somewhere in the
poetry itself. And in fact for readers
of Paradise Lost, and this has been an experience for a few hundred years, it
does often seem that there were some mysterious life force pulsating through
Milton’s dense and driving lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter in Paradise
Lost.
There
is also the power that Milton himself claimed was behind the poetry of Paradise
Lost. Milton insisted and it’s
completely possible that he might actually have believed that God himself was
responsible for composing the poetry of Paradise Lost. John Milton was merely the conduit for God’s
first attempt serious at an epic poem.
So we have, in this perspective, we have an image of the awesome power
of the deity himself, thundering away behind every dot and tilde of Milton’s
great epic.
But
for Milton’s contemporaries in the 17th century, Milton’s power
really wasn’t at all as aesthetic or even religious in nature. Milton’s power was primarily seen as social, political
and cultural. Milton – and this is a
wildly anachronistic use of terms but there is nonetheless a lot of sense to it
– Milton was essentially a left-wing political radical. And it was widely feared by his more timid
contemporaries that his writings would seduce his readers into rejecting good
old fashioned traditional religious and social values. And there was a lot of validity to that
contemporary cultural fear. Milton was a
revolutionary. He was responsible for
writing the first justification for an armed rebellion against a legitimate
monarch, the first to publish such a work essentially in Europe. Milton actually wrote that it was the duty,
not just the right, but the duty of a nation to rise up and dethrone, through
execution, an unjust, though legitimate, king.
And Milton in fact, was largely responsible in a cultural sense that the
fact that the armed rebellion of England’s civil war, what we think of as the
Puritan Revolution, actually led to the execution by decapitation of England’s
monarch – Charles l in 1649. On top of
all of this political revolution, political radicalism, Milton was one of the
first, intellectuals in Europe to speak out in favour not only of divorce,
Milton argued for the right to divorce on grounds of incompatibility, but also
he argued for the right to plural marriage – polygamy. He was branded as a radical and dangerous
debunker of traditional Christian family values.
Many
of you know that Milton, in his later years, was blind, and the fact of his
blindness was in his own day frequently cited by contemporary preachers, men at
the pulpit, as an example of exactly how God punishes who dare to write against
the king or those who dare to write against the institution of marriage or the
family. Milton’s power for so many of these contemporaries was seen as palpably
destructive and truly frightening.
Obviously, it goes without saying that today the assessment of Milton as
some kind of imminent social threat or some sort of social force, in terms of
his radical nature of political power – that has taken a sharp turn. Milton is much more likely imagined to wield
- and if you have a sense of what the mythology surrounding Milton is, you would
have to agree with this – Milton is much more likely to wield a socially
conservative power over his readers. In
the debates ranging for the last 30 years or so over the value of tradition
pedagogy, and over the value of canonical reading lists, Milton is always
cited, invariably cited, as the canon’s most stalwart representative of
oppressive, religious and social value.
There is no question - Milton
is the Dead White Male Poet par
excellence in English literary circles.
His poetry works, at least from this point of view, to solidify those Dead White Male values – whatever those
values are. In the unsuspecting minds of
his readers, none of whom obviously are dead and many of whom are neither white
nor male. Milton’s power from this perspective
of the radical cultural critique is really not so different from the power of
the late Jerry Falwell (1933-2007 American evangelical fundamentalist Southern
Baptist pastor, televangelist, and a conservative political commentator) or
someone like Rush Limbaugh (1891-1996 American radio talk show host and
political commentator). There is
something insidious and culturally malicious and powerful about the social
conservatism of what is thought to be his voice. Now this more or less is the contemporary
picture of John Milton and his more or less contemporary picture as a powerful
force of conservatism derives in large part to the English writer Virginia
Woolf, who wrote for a few decades, but who wrote about Milton during the
1920s. And it’s Woolf’s image that’s
probably the one that’s most firmly rooted in the minds of Milton’s readers
today. For Virginia Woolf, especially in
A Room of One’s Own the dead writer
Milton exercises an active power at the present moment as he forces his female
readers to accept their subordinate place in society. And the text of Milton, especially of
Paradise Lost, therefore has to be seen as an active persistently malignant
conveyor of patriarchal oppression. Now
like all judgement of literary value and literary power and force that the 20th
century feminist evaluation of Milton, Virginia Woolf’s has a complicated and
long prehistory. It is worth our while
to look briefly at some of the complicated steps by which an evaluation like
Virginia Woolf’s actually comes into being.
So let me take you back to the 17th century, up to the very
beginning of the literary reception of John Milton.
So
Milton who had died in 1674 had established himself as the great English poet
within 20 or so years of his death. So
as early as the late 17th century, Milton had already entered what
we can think of as the English literary canon.
He was, for many of his younger contemporaries, a canonical authority
whose wisdom, whose mere opinions could be cited as proof, as some sort of
indisputable evidence for one position or another. An extraordinarily ambitious poet like Milton
naturally derived a great deal of satisfaction, I’m convinced, in his own life
time, in anticipating just this kind of posthumous respect and worship. The fantasy of his fellow Englishmen quoting
him as an authority, much as he had himself had for so many decades quoted
scripture. Now one of the earliest citations
of Paradise Lost that actually appears in print in the 17th century,
comes from the proto-feminist writer Lady Mary Chudleigh. Chudleigh dared to argue, it is an amazing
argument given the time in 1699, that a man - that a woman rather - could be
considered, should be considered as excellent a creature as a man. That women might actually be as ontologically
valuable as men and in making such a point, Chudleigh naturally had to
confront, as writers have for millennia, the scriptural account of the priority
of the sexes. The suggestion that many
readers extract from the Book of Genesis from the Bible that the initial creation
of the male of the species, Adam, seems to establish the privileged rank of the
entire male sex. So Chudleigh attempts
to demonstrate that the Genesis story of Adam and Eve establishes no such
thing. She writes
Woman’s
being created last will not be a very great argument to debase the dignity of
the female sex. If some of the men own
this it is more likely to be true. The
great Milton, a grave author, brings in Adam thus speaking to Eve in Paradise
Lost
Oh
fairest of creations, last and best of all God’s works
And
the great Milton can be invoked here because he has already been established as
an authority, a figure whose very word possesses something like an indisputable
cultural power. And so as a ‘very grave
author’ this is what Chudleigh is implying, Milton can tell us potentially true
about the priority of the sexes. Of
course, like any literary critic, whoever tried to write an analysis of
anything, Chudleigh had no choice but to nudge the lines that she is quoting
out of context. And it has been said
that, to quote anybody is necessarily to misrepresent him and this fact is
obviously a very good thing for Lady Mary Chudleigh since Milton would
certainly not himself would have wanted to suggest that women are superior to
men. Milton in fact soon goes on in
Paradise Lost, right after this very passage that she cites, Milton the
narrator berates Adam for his over-valuation of his wife through the character
of the archangel Rafael. I think this is
one of the great ironies of the English literary history, certainly in the
reception of the poet Milton that one of the very first published discussions
of Milton’s epic attempts to enlist John Milton as a proponent of
feminism. Now we don’t have to be overly
concerned here with Chudleigh’s generous oversight of Milton’s generally sexist
bias. What is important for our
immediate purposes is the identification of Milton as a cultural
authority. He’s a literary power. A figure who can be called upon to supply the
voice of tradition itself. He could be
called upon in fact exactly as he is by Lady Mary here to contradict
scripture. It is this power to
contradict the word of God that makes Milton a force then which is hard to
imagine anything more powerful.
Milton
is discussed in a very different manner a year later in a work published by
Mary Astell in 1700 in a far more remarkably feminist way. A remarkable cry for the liberation of women
from what she describes and characterizes as domestic oppression. Astell writes the following:
Patience
and submission are the only comforts that are left to a poor people who groan
under tyranny unless they are strong enough to break the yoke. Not Milton himself would cry up liberty to
poor female slaves or plead for the lawfulness of resisting a private tyranny.
So
Milton for Astell was hardly the embodiment for orthodoxy as he is for Lady
Chudleigh. For Astell, Milton remains
the subversive revolutionary whose treatises against the tyranny of the Stuart
Monarchy, whose treatises against the tyranny against Charles l established his
reputation as a liberator. A liberator
of all the oppressed and enslaved citizens of England and that is Milton’s
rhetoric – that rhetoric belongs to Milton himself. But Astell resents, of course, Milton here
and what she resents is the limitation of his subversiveness. He refused to extend his critique of tyranny
in the political realm to a critique of man’s domestic tyranny over women in
the private realm – in the domestic sphere. It’s as if Mary Astell is saying that
Milton was on the right track but he simply didn’t go far enough. He didn’t extend the logic of his
position. Now Milton’s – now it has to
be said of Mary Astell image of Milton is probably the product of a much closer
reading of Paradise Lost than Lady Mary Chudleigh’s was, Astell certainly seems to have noticed that
Milton’s notorious and of course
deplorable line in Paradise Lost of God’s creation of Adam and Eve.
He
for God only, she for god in him.
And
Milton’s narrator tells us of the creation of Adam and Eve. And Mary Astell is clearly responding to this
and her statement points to the persistent worry and it is a worry that even
now exists in the 20th century about the nature of Milton’s
power. Is this guy a revolutionary or is
he a reactionary? Astell distinguishes
Milton’s cry against political tyranny from her own critique, her own cry
against a patriarchal tyranny. And in
making this distinction she’s exposing the uncomfortable affinity between two
competing, equally progressive social movements. And you will see this phenomenon manifest
itself throughout your reading of Milton.
What we see here is the strange proximity and it is often a very uncomfortable
proximity of Milton’s rhetoric of political liberation to the proto-feminist
rhetoric of domestic liberation that is just beginning to emerge at the end of
the 17th century. Now in the
middle years of the 17th century during English revolution that saw
the execution of the king, and saw the establishment of a non-monarchic
republican government, Milton had practically the formal language, the literary
language, of insubordination. He
developed an entire vocabulary, a rhetoric of righteous disobedience, of
resistance, of protest and revolution. It
is a measure of Milton’s anti-tyrannical language that it can be used against
Milton himself. A writer like Mary
Astell can employ Milton’s revolutionary rhetoric to advance a course which
John Milton would himself have had difficulty subscribing - that the dead
Milton could exercise a social power that had nothing whatsoever to do with the
living Milton’s own social views.
Now
fast forwarding a couple of centuries and look at Virginia Woolf. By the time we get to Woolf in the early part
of the 20th century, Milton has come to be associated with
essentially all of these ways of thinking about power, however contradictory
they are. He’s the very voice of
traditional wisdom for some, as he was for Lady Chudleigh, and he is the voice
of political subversiveness for others, as he was for Mary Astell. He was a
friend of women everywhere, as he was for at least a few of his female readers
of the 18th century and for many he is the very embodiment of oppressive
patriarchy. It is Virginia Woolf who is
largely responsible for our sense of Milton’s identity of oppressive
patriarchal literary voice. But Virginia
Woolf too had inherited these contradictory ways of thinking about Milton and
about Milton’s power. In 1924, Woolf is
beginning to formulate her dazzling feminist critique of the masculine
traditions, what she thinks of as the masculine traditions of literary
writing. And she is not just one of the
first literary critics to reveal the most famous writers have been men,
everyone had always known that. But she
is one of the first literary critics to reveal that most famous writers have
been writing as men. Exerting the influence
of their sex, that’s to use her language, in a manner that implicitly glorifies
their masculinity – implicitly glorifies all men. But this is not so with Milton she writes in
1924. This is Woolf’s amazing argument here:
There
is a small group of writers whose work is pure, uncontaminated, sexless as the
angels are said to be sexless and Milton is their leader.
Like
Lady Chudleigh, Woolf holds up Milton as a powerful authority. He is almost a mythological figure who can
sanction, who can authorize this revolution in women’s writing that Virginia
Woolf is beginning to prophesize here, early in the 20th
century. But this of course, as we know,
this is only one of the ways in which Milton’s power or what Woolf thinks of as
his leadership, can be thought of.
In
1928, Milton has come to represent for Virginia Woolf a very different type of
cultural force. Near the conclusion of
the perfectly extraordinary book A Room of One’s Own Woolf elaborates
on her prophesy of a feminist future in a world in which women can be viewed -
a literary feminist future; a world in which women can be viewed in no less
stature and of no less power than men.
For
my belief is that if we live another century or so and have five hundred a year
each of us and rooms of our own, if we have the habit of freedom and the courage
to write exactly what we think; if we look past Milton’s bogey for no human
being should shut out the view. Then the opportunity will come and the dead
poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often
laid down.
Now
the language is intentionally and sublimely opaque apocalyptic here as Woolf
imagines what might have happened to Judith Shakespeare had she been given the
cultural opportunities of her more privileged brother, William. But the anticipated triumph of women writers
can never occur, according to Virginia Woolf here, until we look past his
bogey. She is ingeniously vague about
what Milton’s bogey is. Milton’s bogey
would seem to be that frightening shadow cast over wives who might find
themselves identifying with the subordinate Milton’s Eve. Milton’s bogey seems to be the spectre that
hovering over women poets or women writers who may find in Milton an
identification of poetic strength with masculinity itself. Now Woolf does not explain exactly how it is
that Milton is shutting out the view, and she doesn’t try to explain what the
view would look like if it weren’t shut out but in citing the power of what she
claims to be this Puritan bogey.
Virginia Woolf really subtly reveals how difficult it is even for her to
shut out entirely the real or it might just be the bogus power of John
Milton. At the very moment that Woolf
advises women readers to look past Milton’s bogey she finds herself in the
peculiar position of echoing the poetry of John Milton. And this is an unbelievable thing to have
happened, at one of the formative moments of 20th century
feminism. She is alluding here to one of
the most famous passages in Paradise Lost in which Milton is asserting nothing
other than this poetic power.
That
the blind poet calls on the Holy Spirit to assist him in the composition of the
epic. He asks the heavenly muse at the
end of the passage to see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight. And Milton is going to need this additional
help from God because as he said
Wisdom
at one entrance is quite shut out
Milton’s
blindness, the fact of his blindness has shut out his view of the visible
world, that would ordinarily present itself to him through the entrance of his
eyes. This shut out will enable him,
will help him to explore the invisible world of divine truth. Now when Virginia Woolf writes that Milton
has shut out the view of his female reader, she seems to be suggesting that the
spectre of Milton blinds women to the things that they should be seeing, the
most important truths, out there in the world.
How troubling though this seems undeniable, how strange, that Woolf,
really at her most radical is echoing the very words of the power she is
opposing. It’s almost as if she were
saying in some way, in a post Miltonic world, which is the world we all live
in, it’s impossible fully to look past Milton bogey. The rhetoric of power, the literary
strategies of power and in some cases the very experience of power, and of
literary power have become inextricably tied and indebted to Milton. In this great prophecy of 20th
century feminism Woolf is essentially proposing a revolution and it’s as if the
text is here telling us that whether we like it or not, whether we like Milton
or not the language of revolution is one that is forever and always indebted to
that bogey man, John Milton. As Virginia
Woolf had written ‘Milton is our leader’.
In
Paradise Lost, the representation of power for which Milton is most celebrated
is the power exhibited in the failed revolution against God - the revolution against
God by Satan and his fellow rebels. Our
sense of Milton’s power, however that power is imagined, is intimately related
to the way in which Milton himself represents power in the characters of Satan
and of God in Paradise Lost.
Satan
and the rebel angels have been roundly defeated, they’ve been humiliated by the
son of God and the other priggish loyalist angels so they are pained, utterly
humiliated, they are prostrate on the burning lake of this miserable new realm
called Hell. Nonetheless, Satan pulls
himself together and begins to analyse, to theorise his situation. He describes for us his own power that
somehow manages to survive even a terrifying and humiliating defeat like the
one he’s just experienced. So this is
Satan:
What
though the field be lost
All
is not lost, the unconquerable will and study of revenge immortal hate
Encourage
never to submit or yield and what is else not to overcome
That
glory never shall his wrath or might extort from me. To bow and sooth for grace with suppliant
knee and deify his power who from the terror of this arm so late doubted his
empire. That were low indeed. That were ignominy and shame beneath this
downfall
Now
we might at first think that Satan is vaunting here is a product of nothing
more elevated than hate and a desire for revenge. Milton is doing something truly extraordinary
and the imaginative achievement in Satan’s speech is easy to miss. Satan finds it ignominious and shameful to
lower himself to God. To bow and sooth
to grace with suppliant knee and deify his power. This kind of admission is shameful not
because it’s simply always shameful to so debase oneself. It’s an ignominy and a shame it may very well
be, what Satan is implying here, that God is not actually omnipotent. Would an omnipotent, truly all powerful God
actually doubt the extent of his own power?
In Virginia Woolf’s terms Satan is trying to look past God’s bogey. He tries to get behind the highly theatrical,
the culturally constructed illusion of God’s power. You can hear Satan “So what if we lost? The important thing is we may have lost this
battle, but the important thing is that God revealed a terror of this arm; of
our strength. A fear of the military
strength of the rebel angels is what is manifested in this war. God was so afraid of us that he actually
doubted his hold on his own empire and an empire that he was only able to
maintain because of good luck or something like superior military fire
power. But certainly nothing is grand or
is absolute as omnipotence. This is an
amazing for Satan to say after his fall.
Even the expulsion of Satan from heaven was not sufficient to prove
beyond a shadow of a doubt the legitimate authority of God. That Satan is still able to doubt the
legitimacy of God’s power is a testimony to the complexity of the analysis of
power in Paradise Lost.
No
power, not even God’s power can be irresistibly and indisputably proven. Satan refuses in this speech to deify the
power of the conquering enemy and in this refusal Satan resembles no one so
much as John Satan. John Milton the
political leftist who refused to deify the power of the English King Charles l,
whom so many of his contemporaries considered to be God’s anointed. John Milton who wrote hundreds of pages of
anti-monarchic propaganda until King Charles’ head was safely severed from his
body. Like Milton, Satan is in the
business of demystifying power; of exposing political or cultural power as
something that is not inherently there; or naturally there. Power is something that is created by a human
process of deification; a process of king worship; or a process of God worship;
or book worship. Or a process for that
matter of poet worship. Now later on in
Paradise Lost, Satan comes to the conclusion that that old man in Heaven who
had assumed the authority to issue all those arbitrary decrees. Satan finally relents and concedes that he is
actually an omnipotent God and that that God is or was the omnipotent creator
of all things. But despite this enormous
concession and this realisation, Satan is still justified in his cynical
demystification of God’s behaviour before the defeat of the rebel angels. And Satan complains now that God never bothered
to demonstrate to the angels just how powerful he was.
But
he who reigns monarch in heaven till then as one secure sat on his throne
upheld by old repute, consent or custom and his regal state put forth at all
but still his strength concealed which tempted our attempt and wrought our fall.
Satan
is saying that before the war in Heaven, God’s power just seemed like any other
king’s power. As if God sat on the
throne Heaven merely because of the humanly constructed reasons of tradition or
of old repute or of consent or custom.
Now, alas, for Satan it turns out that God’s monarchy was based on
genuine happened to be sitting in the
best chair. But in Satan’s articulation
of what we can think of as dialectical power on authority, he provides us with
a useful analysis of the problems besetting any understanding of power. The kinds of authority established by the
bogeys of traditional and custom and conservative tradition are not always
distinguishable from the kinds of authority that are based on genuine
strength. And even if we locate a source
of some kind of genuine strength, authoritative strength, it is still usually
possible, as it is for Satan, to argue that that power is really base, a concealed product of
custom or what we would think of as cultural construction. To be a king, one need merely put forward
one’s regal state; one simply needs to act kingly.
Now
the matter of Satan’s critique of God’s power is raised because the evaluation
and criticism of Milton, and especially Milton’s poetry has hinged for a couple
of centuries now on a related set of questions about this poet’s power. ‘Is Milton powerful for the very straight
forward reason that he is in possession of this tremendous literary strength; this
unimaginable talent? Or does Milton only seem powerful because of the
traditional religious values which he is so intimately associated? Does Milton only seem powerful because he has
the force or the strength of the age old literary canon behind him? Does Milton only seem powerful
because he is the very literary embodiment of patriarchy and masculine
bias? It goes without saying that these
are questions that are impossible for us to try to answer, certainly now. But Milton lets us know later in Paradise
Lost that Satan was wrong to embark on his dangerous deconstruction of divine
power. Milton ultimately is a pious man,
wants us to frown critique of the Judeo Christian conception of divinity. But Satan, regardless of Milton’s ultimate
dismissal of Satan’s position, and Satan’s analysis of power and of God’s power
especially, isn’t that easily dismissible.
And that is not simply because Satan bears such a strong resemblance to
Milton, as of course he does. Satan
looks ahead to us; Satan resembles us as readers, as we attempt to dissect and
to anatomize the power of Milton’s poetry.
A satanic sensibility may be one of our best guides in our reading of
Milton. It is Milton’s satan who best
prepares us to explore what we can think of as the labyrinth of Miltonic
power. He puts us in a position to
explore that truly weird, but undeniable process whereby the very word Milton,
the name Milton stops referring to a particular middle class Londoner who was
born in 1608 and begins to embody the very essence of that strange and
inexplicable phenomenon that we call ‘literary power’.
