Angel or devil?

Two decades ago, I was opening the mail while my father was visiting. In the post had come several books of literary criticism. “Why,” my father asked, “would anyone want to read books about other books?”

A good question, that. Orlando Reade answers it well in What in Me Is Dark (Astra House, 272 pp.), an entertaining, wide-ranging, and generally well-researched account of the meaning and influence of John Milton’s great epic, Paradise Lost.

We do not expect an epic like Milton’s to be controversial. Everyone agrees it is a classic. It is taught in schools with only a few grumbles from uncomprehending students; it is taken for granted like wallpaper; on august occasions, it is quoted to approving nods all around. When mentioned on The Simpsons, nearly everyone gets the joke.

But Paradise Lost has always been controversial. From its publication in 1667, it was the first epic poem in English to be written in a consistently awe-striking style, one which crowned but also brought to a close the golden age of English literature that had begun with Shakespeare. Everyone recognized its poetic power, but its first readers were confused by its exclusion of rhyme, while later ones were disturbed by its almost savage rhetorical force. “None ever wished it longer than it is,” quipped Samuel Johnson.

The poets who immediately followed Milton thought him uncouth and regretted that such great genius had not been born at a more civilized hour. The romantic poets of the 19th century thought Milton’s poem a revelation of the imagination and imitated him in the pursuit of sublime expression. In noting that Milton gave his best line to the devil, the romantics found a moral lesson regarding the freedom of the imagination. A century on, and the modernists would find him not free but fusty, Latinate, and gaudily ornamental—a poetic god of sorts to be dethroned. T.S. Eliot dismissed Paradise Lost as a series of “large but insufficiently furnished apartments filled by heavy conversation.”

Paradise Lost retells the story of the fall of man and elaborates the rebellion of the angels that led to the founding of hell and the beginnings of the torment of all human beings by Satan (an irritation that has continued unabated ever since). By rights, it should be the finest artistic expression of Christian civilization. But Milton’s radical species of Protestantism is as contested in our day as it was in his. According to C.S. Lewis, Milton softened his multiple heresies in order to give the world a great Christian poem. And yet, for other readers, Paradise Lost seems hardly a religious work of art at all, but merely a reflection of Milton’s radical and regicidal politics, his individualistic morality, given the mere patina of Christianity through the use of allegory.

Many who undertake reading the poem recognize its greatness yet still grow bored and set it aside. But others down the centuries have shown that Milton’s poem could inspire, provoke, and deepen our culture—in curious and fascinating ways. Reade sets out to tell the story of Milton’s poem, but in the service of documenting its “revolutionary afterlife.” He gives us not so much a work of literary criticism as a curious story with many surprising chapters that anyone might enjoy.

Reade knows what it means to feel ambivalent about Milton. As a student, he found the poet inaccessible. Only when he came to teach Milton’s epic to the inmates of a New Jersey prison did the work open itself to his imagination. As he shows us, Paradise Lost often “comes alive” in unpredictable ways. It stirred and affirmed the grotesque racial politics of Malcom X and served as a sounding board for the psychologist Jordan Peterson as he inquired into the nature of evil. Verses from Milton’s poem—especially those voiced by Satan—inspired revolutionaries from Virginia to Haiti (among them, Thomas Jefferson, who copied out Milton’s verses at length and wrote about them in his little-known treatise on prosody), feminists in England (Virginia Woolf), and merrymakers at Mardi Gras in 19th-century New Orleans. Milton’s poem shaped the verse of William Wordsworth and the novels of George Eliot, but also shaped the imagination of American abolitionists, German social theorists, and even the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt.

Great literature lives far beyond the page and shapes the culture even of those who could not scan a line of Milton’s “heroic verse.” Even when we hate it, we are often nourished by it; even Satan’s words can prove fruitful for one generation, while the next may learn why it is that Milton first put those words in Satan’s mouth. Reade helps us understand the substance of Milton’s poem but also the stakes—what the poem has meant to generations of readers and why, resistant though so many remain to Milton’s achievement, Paradise Lost is a poem worth arguing with and arguing about. Reade’s attentions are given not to the enthusiasts, but to those people who substantially engaged with the meaning of Milton’s poem on their way to shaping modern history.

These various chapters on the influence of the poem are interesting in their own right, but they also serve as a lesson for our postliterate age regarding the effects—sometimes subtle, sometimes grand—that an engagement with epic poetry can bring about. Milton’s verse has spoken to the enslaved, imprisoned, and excluded, to the alienated and the exiled, and sent each into the world with something new. We come away from the book with a sense of how the same poem can at once serve as a bulwark of spiritual or social order and also as a means of crashing the gates. If it seems as if everyone has read Milton, Reade also shows us that what people find there may be unpredictable and even uncontainable.

It is true that Reade’s study sometimes panders to a contemporary sensibility that will tolerate literature or other works of art only to the extent that they can be harnessed for this or that cause of “social justice.” Sometimes he cannot resist promulgating his own left-wing prejudices (prejudices which are embarrassingly on display in his recent article in The Nation, “Why Is the Right Obsessed With Epic Poetry?”). As such, it would seem this book does not so much vindicate the greatness of Paradise Lost to mankind as it does chronicle the various causes for which the poem has proven useful.

But this only helps us better grasp why the poem is praised as great yet goes unloved, often by the same people who praise it. Further, it clarifies the controversial nature of the poem from the beginning. Is it a classic poem, a Christian epic, or a radical’s political tract? Reade shows us that Milton could be all three at once: Whether angel or devil, Milton’s poem has proved itself to be immortal.