Professor John Rogers:
For a vast number of complicated reasons,
Milton has invited for 350 years now a uniquely violent --
and I do think it's a violent -- response to the particular
question of his value as a poet. And the violence,
I think, of this reaction is due in large part to our
tendency to think of Milton and of Milton's work in terms of the
category of power. So I've 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
long-standing conviction in English letters of Milton's
power or his strength as a poet. It's practically impossible to
begin a reading of Milton without the burden of
innumerable prejudices and preconceptions.
Milton's reputation always precedes him.
And in fact that's always been the case even in his lifetime.
Even if we've 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 of the story
of the Garden of Eden, and so it's especially
difficult to read Paradise Lost without bringing to it
some sense of the power of the religious problems,
the theological and 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 pleasure or wit
or beauty that has been associated with the experience
of reading Milton. Those are the categories of
value that we tend to associate or to affiliate with our other
favorite writers, writers as diverse as
Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, for example.
But in our collective cultural consciousness,
if there is a such thing, whether we like him or not we
tend to think of John Milton as powerful.
And the reasons for this coupling of the name Milton and
of this idea or the metaphor of power,
I think, are worth looking in to.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.
In Milton we have a man who was able to state -- now just think
about this for a moment, I take this to be an absolutely
remarkable fact -- we have in Milton a man who was able to
state categorically in his early twenties--so just a few years
older than you are now-- that the epic poem that he would not
even begin writing for another twenty-five years would become
an unforgettable work of English literature.
Milton anticipated and lovingly invested all of his energy in
his future literary power and his future literary fame.
He anticipated this power much as his father,
a reasonably well-to-do banker, might have anticipated
long-term earnings from a particularly risky business
venture. In Milton's case this
investment in power paid off. Milton would eventually come to
feel so comfortable with the mantle of power that he was able
to do much more than simply rewrite the first books of the
Bible (which is of course one of the things that he accomplished
in Paradise Lost, and that is itself no
mean undertaking). By the end of his life,
though, Milton would in effect try to rewrite everything.
After he'd published all of his major poems, he began publishing
a spate of works that attempted to re-create British culture
from the ground up. He invented his own system of
philosophical logic. He published a treatise that 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 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, I think, in which Milton wanted
to re-create all of Western culture or to re-create all of
Western culture in his own image.
Regardless of what we think of the success of that example or
of the appeal of the attempt to do such a thing,
the amazing thing, I think, 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.
And so it seems to me 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 has tended to confer upon Milton
the man, the image of Milton the man,
and of Milton's writing.Now,
probably the form of power that we most readily associated with
John Milton involves his position at the dead center of
the English literary canon. This goes beyond questioning.
He's an object of worship by British and American
institutions of higher education,
and my guess is that few of you have failed to observe that it's
practically impossible to graduate from Yale with a
Bachelor of Arts in English without having read Paradise
Lost either in English 125, or DS Litm or,
in fact, in a course just like this one.
Those of you who are taking this course because you have
to take one of the pre-1800s and Milton is one of those,
you are more than entitled to ask why the poet,
this poet, Milton, is exercising this
institutional sway over you as you go about choosing your
courses or perhaps as you experience your courses in some
way as having been chosen for you.It would be utterly
inadequate for us to account for this institutional and surreal
institutional power that Milton holds over us by stating blandly
that Milton is the greatest English poet.
That's the easy answer obviously, and of course it's
not untrue. But we can do better than that.
We can anatomize 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 the beauty of Milton's verse,
an aesthetic power that's often thought or felt to inhere
somewhere in the poetry itself. In fact for readers of
Paradise Lost, and this has been an
experience now for a few hundred years,
it does often seem as if there were some mysterious life force,
a pulsating through Milton's dense and driving lines of
unrhymed, iambic pentameter.
And now there's 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,
that John Milton was merely the conduit for God's first
serious attempt at an epic poem. And so in this perspective we
have an image of the awesome power of the Deity Himself
thundering away behind every jot and tittle of Milton's great
epic.But for Milton's contemporaries in the
seventeenth century, Milton's power really wasn't at
all aesthetic or even religious in nature.
Milton's power was primarily seen as social and political and
cultural. This is a wildly anachronistic
use of terms, but there's nonetheless a lot
of sense of 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 in to rejecting good, old-fashioned,
traditional religious and social values.
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 in, essentially, all of 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.
Milton in fact was largely responsible in a cultural sense
for 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 the First in 1649.
And on top of all of this political revolution,
the political radicalism, Milton was one of the first
intellectuals in Europe to speak out in favor not only of divorce
-- Milton argued for the right to divorce on grounds of
incompatibility -- but also he argued in favor of the right to
plural marriage, polygamy.
He was branded as a radical and dangerous debunker of
traditional Christian family values.Now,
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 those who dare to
write against the king or those who dare to write against the
institution of marriage or the family.
And 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 the radical nature of political
power -- that has taken a sharp turn.
Milton is much more likely imagined to wield -- and if you
have any sense of what the mythology surrounding Milton is,
you would have to agree with this -- a socially conservative
power over his readers.In the debates ranging for the last
thirty years or so over the value of traditional 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 values. There's no question:
Milton is the dead white male poet par excellence in English
letters certainly, and his poetry works,
at least from this point of view, to solidify those dead
white male values, whatever those 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 or someone like Rush Limbaugh.
There is something insidious and culturally malicious and
powerful about the social conservatism of what is thought
to be his voice.Now this is the contemporary picture of John
Milton and this more or less contemporary picture of Milton
as a powerful force of conservatism derives in large
part from the English writer Virginia Woolf,
who wrote about Milton during the 1920s.
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, and especially of Paradise
Lost, therefore has to be seen as an active,
persistently malignant conveyor of patriarchal oppression.
Now, like all judgments of literary value and literary
power and force, the twentieth-century feminist
evaluation of Milton, Virginia Woolf's,
has a complicated and long prehistory, and it's worth our
while to look briefly at some of the complicated steps by which
an evaluation like Virginia Woolf's actually comes in to
being. So let me take you back.
You can now look at your handouts.
Let me take you back to the seventeenth century,
up to the very beginning of the literary reception of John
Milton.Milton, who had died in 1674,
had established himself as a great English poet within twenty
or so years of his death. As early as the late
seventeenth century, Milton had already entered what
we can think of as the English literary canon.
For many of his younger contemporaries,
he was a canonical authority whose wisdom,
whose mere opinions, could be cited as proof,
as some sort of indisputable evidence,
for one position or another And an extraordinarily ambitious
poet like Milton naturally derived a great deal of
satisfaction, I'm convinced,
in his own lifetime, in anticipating just this kind
of posthumous respect and worship,
the fantasy of his fellow Englishmen quoting him as
an authority much as he himself had for so many decades quoted
scripture.Now, one of the earliest -- and I
think this is a remarkable fact -- one of the earliest citations
of Paradise Lost that actually appears in print in the
seventeenth century comes from the proto-feminist writer Lady
Mary Chudleigh. Chudleigh dared to argue -- and
it's an amazing argument, given the time -- in 1699
Chudleigh argued that a woman could be considered and 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 -- Chudleigh had to
confront the problem of the scriptural account of the
priority of the sexes, the suggestion that many
readers extract from the Book of Genesis in the Bible that the
initial creation of the male of the species,
Adam, seems to establish the privileged rank of the entire
male sex. And so Chudleigh attempts to
demonstrate -- and this is the passage at the top of the
handout -- 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
[she continues] 'tis more likely to be true.
The great Milton, a grave author,
brings in Adam thus speaking to Eve in Paradise Lost [and
then she quotes Adam speaking to Eve],
"Oh, fairest of creation, last and best of all God's
works." The great Milton can be invoked
here because he has already been established as an authority.
He's already been established as a figure whose very word
possesses something like an indisputable cultural power.
So as a very "grave author" -- and this is what Chudleigh is
implying -- Milton can tell us something potentially true about
the priority of the sexes.Of course--and you know this to be
the case from your own writing of papers in the English
department-- like any literary critic who ever tried to write
an analysis of anything, Chudleigh has no choice but to
nudge the lines that she's quoting out of context.
It's 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 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 overvaluation of his wife through the character
of the Archangel Raphael. I think this is one of the
great ironies of 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
what I take to be Chudleigh's generous oversight of Milton's
generally sexist bias. What's important for our
immediate purposes is her identification of Milton as a
cultural authority. He's a literary power,
a figure who could be called upon to supply the voice of
tradition in itself. He can be called upon in fact
exactly as he is by Lady Mary here.
He can be called upon to contradict scripture:
and it's this power to contradict the Word of God that
makes Milton a force than which it's hard to imagine anything
more powerful.Now as you can see from the handout,
Milton is discussed in a very different manner a year later in
a work published by Mary Astell in 1700 and in an even more
remarkably feminist 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 or resisting a private
tyranny. So Milton for Astell is hardly
the embodiment of orthodoxy that he is for Lady Mary Chudleigh.
For Astell, Milton remains the subversive revolutionary whose
treatises against the tyranny of the Stuart monarchy,
whose treatises against the tyranny of Charles the First
established his reputation as a liberator,
a liberator of all of the oppressed and enslaved citizens
of England, and that's 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 woman in the private realm,
in the domestic sphere. It's as if Mary Astell were
saying, "Well, Milton was on the right track.
He simply didn't go far enough. He didn't extend the logic of
his position."Now it has to be said that Mary Astell's 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 Milton's notorious and,
of course, deplorable line in Paradise Lost about God's
creation of Adam and Eve: "He for God only,
she for God in him," Milton's narrator tells us of God's
creation of Adam and Eve. Mary Astell is clearly
responding to this. Her statement points to a
persistent worry, and it's a worry that exists
even now in the twentieth 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 the patriarchal tyranny,
and in making this distinction she's exposing something that I
take to be extremely interesting.
She's exposing the uncomfortable affinity between
two competing, equally progressive social
movements. You'll see this phenomenon
manifest itself throughout your reading of Milton,
I'm convinced; and what we see here is the
strange proximity, and it's 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^( )seventeenth century.Now in the middle
years of the seventeenth century during the English revolution
that saw the execution of the king and saw the establishment
of a non-monarchic republican government,
Milton had practically invented the formal language,
the literary language, of insubordination.
He developed an entire vocabulary, a rhetoric of
righteous disobedience, of resistance,
of protest and revolution. And I think it's a measure of
the power 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 cause to which John Milton himself would
of course have had difficulty subscribing;
a dead Milton could exercise a social power that had nothing
whatsoever to do with the living Milton's own social
views.Now we'll fast forward a couple of centuries and look
at Virginia Woolf. By the time we get to Woolf in
the early part of the twentieth 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 Mary Chudleigh.
And he's the voice of political subversiveness for others,
as he was for Mary Astell. He's the friend of women
everywhere, at least for a few of his female readers in the
eighteenth century, and for many he's the very
embodiment of oppressive patriarchy.I mentioned
earlier that it's Virginia Woolf who's largely responsible for
our sense of Milton's identity as an oppressive patriarchal
literary voice, but Virginia Woolf,
too, had inherited these contradictory ways of thinking
about Milton and about Milton's power.
And you can see from the handout that 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's not just
one of the first literary critics to reveal that most
famous writers have been men (everyone had already,
had always known that), but she's 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 [she writes in 1924]
with Milton. There's [and this is Woolf's
amazing argument here] a small group of writers whose
work [and I'm quoting her] is pure,
uncontaminated, sexless as the angels are said
to be sexless and Milton is their leader [she tells
us]. Like Lady Mary Chudleigh,
Woolf holds up Milton as a powerful authority.
He's almost a mythological figure who can sanction,
who can authorize this revolution in women's writing
that Virginia Woolf is beginning to prophesy here early in the
twentieth century.But this of course,
as we know, 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, and this is the next
quotation on the handout, 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 prophecy of a feminist future,
a world in which women can be viewed -- a literary feminist
future – a world in which women can be
viewed as writers of no less stature and of no less power
than men. So this is Woolf I am quoting:
For my belief is [and I'll have to skip around a
little bit] that if we live another century
or so and have 500 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 really sublimely opaque and 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 "Milton's
bogey" -- until we look past "Milton's bogey."
She's ingeniously vague about what Milton's bogey is.
I have puzzled over this, I've puzzled over this phrase
for years, and I'm not even remotely satisfied that I have a
clue what she means: but Milton's bogey would
seem to be, I think, that frightening
shadow that Milton casts over wives who might find themselves
identifying with the subordinate Milton's Eve.
Milton's bogey seems to be the specter hovering over
women poets or women writers who may find in Milton an
identification of poetic strength with masculinity
itself.Now Woolf doesn't try to 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
suddenly reveals, I think, 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.
This is, I think, an unbelievable thing to have
happen at one of the formative moments of twentieth-century
feminism. She's alluding here,
I think, to one of the most famous passages in Paradise
Lost in which Milton is asserting nothing other than his
poetic power.This is on the handout.
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 help him "see and tell of things
invisible to mortal sight," and Milton's going to need this
additional help from God because, as he says -- this is
near the middle of the passage -- because "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,
which would ordinarily present itself to him through the
entrance of his eyes; and this shut-out will
enable him, will help him, explore the invisible world of
divine truth.Now when Virginia Woolf writes that
Milton's bogey has shut out the view of his female readers,
she seems to be suggesting that the specter 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 -- and how
strange that Woolf really at her most radical is echoing the very
words of the power that she's opposing!
It's almost as if she were saying in some way,
in a post-Miltonic world, which is the world that we all
live in, it's impossible fully to look
past Milton's bogey; that the rhetoric of power,
the literary strategies of power, and in some cases the
very experience of power, have become inextricably tied
and indebted to Milton. And in this great prophecy of
twentieth-century feminism, Woolf is essentially proposing
a cultural revolution. And it's as if the text here
were 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 bogeyman John
Milton, as Virginia Woolf had written,
"Milton is our leader."Now some of you I'm assuming will
already have read Paradise Lost and so it will come to
you as no surprise that 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. My guess is that 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. Look at the next passage.
This is from 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're prostrate on the
burning lake of this miserable new realm called hell,
yet nonetheless Satan pulls himself together and begins to
analyze, to theorize, 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,
And courage 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 sue 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 an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall. (I.105-116) Now we might at first think
that Satan's vaunting here is the product of nothing more
elevated than hate and a desire for revenge,
but Milton's doing something truly extraordinary.
I think that the imaginative achievement here in Satan's
speech is easy to miss. Satan finds it ignominious and
shameful to lower himself to God, to bow and sue for grace
with suppliant knee and deify His power,
but this kind of submission is shameful not because it's simply
always shameful so to debase oneself.
It's an ignominy and a shame because it may very well be -- I
think this is without question what Satan is implying here --
it may very well be that God is not actually omnipotent.
Would an omnipotent, would a truly all-powerful God
actually doubt the extent of His own empire?
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, and you can hear Satan saying,
"Well, so what if we lost? 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 was manifest in this war.
God was so afraid of us that He actually doubted His hold on His
own empire, an empire that He was only
actually able to maintain because of good luck or
something like superior military firepower,
but certainly nothing as grand and as absolute as
omnipotence."This is an amazing thing 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,
I think, 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 Milton: John Milton,
the political leftist who refused to deify the power of
the English king Charles the First,
who 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's
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 simply inherently there
or naturally there. Power is something -- and this
is what we learn from a reading of John Milton -- 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 of those
arbitrary decrees -- Satan finally relents and concedes
that He is actually an omnipotent God and that that God
actually is, or was, the omnipotent creator
of all things. But despite this enormous
concession and this realization, Satan is still justified,
I think, in his cynical demystification of God's
behavior 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.
And so this is the last quotation on the handout.
Satan again: But He who reigns
Monarch in Heav'n, till then as one secure
Sat on his Throne, upheld by old repute,
Consent or custom, and his Regal State
Put forth at full, but still his strength
conceal'd, Which tempted our attempt and
wrought our fall. (I.637-642)
Satan's 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 of heaven merely because of those
humanly constructed reasons of tradition,
or of old repute or consent or custom.
Now alas for Satan, it turned out that God's
monarchy was actually based on genuine strength.
It wasn't simply that God just happened to be wearing the crown
and just happened to be sitting in the best chair;
but in Satan's articulation of what we can think of as a
dialectic of power and 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
tradition and custom and conservative tradition are not
always distinguishable from the kinds of authority that are
based on genuine strength. Even if we locate a source of
some kind of genuine strength, authoritative strength,
it's still usually possible, as it is for Satan,
to argue that that power is really at base just the
concealed product of custom or what we would think of as
cultural construction. To be a king,
one need merely put forth one's regal state, one simply needs to
act kingly.Now I raise the matter of Satan's critique of
God's power because the evaluation and the criticism of
Milton, and especially of 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 straightforward reason that he's
in possession of this tremendous literary strength,
this unimaginable talent? Or has Milton only seemed
powerful because of the traditional religious values
with 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's the very literary
embodiment of patriarchy and masculine bias?It goes
without saying that these are questions that it's 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 and wants us to frown on Satan's critique of the
Judeo-Christian conception of divinity.
But regardless of Milton's ultimate dismissal of Satan's
position, Satan's analysis of power,
and of God's power especially, isn't that easily dismissible.
And that's not simply because Satan bears such a strong
resemblance to Milton, as, of course,
he does. I'm convinced Satan looks ahead
to us as well. Satan resembles us as
readers as we attempt to dissect and to anatomize the power of
Milton's poetry. I would go so far to say that
something like a satanic sensibility may be one of our
best guides in our reading of Milton.
It's Milton's Satan who best prepares us -- I'll throw this
out here at the end of this lecture -- 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.So the lecture is over. For next time,
make sure that you will have read at the very least Milton's
great poem, and he wrote it when he was
only twenty-one years old, "The Ode on Christ's Nativity."
And read, of course, the other two poems that were
assigned for the class. But we'll be focusing on what
we call "The Nativity Ode." Okay, that's it.
Cool. I love the level of detail you can get into with a full course on one poet.
cool
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