Milton

ENGL 220 - Lecture 1 - Introduction: Milton, Power, and the Power

of Milton
Chapter 1. Introduction: Milton’s Power as a Poet [00:00:00]
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.

Chapter 2. Lady Mary Chudleigh on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes [00:15:37]
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.

Chapter 3. Mary Astell on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes [00:19:42]
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 theseventeenth 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.

Chapter 4. Virginia Woolf on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes [00:24:03]
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.”

Chapter 5. Milton, Power and the Revolution against God by Satan [00:32:20]
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.