“The sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a Republican and a bold enquirer into morals and religion.”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820)
Milton was an idol to the Romantics not only for his poetic genius but for his political radicalism as an eloquent enemy of tyranny: a fierce defender of free speech, an opponent of monarchical power, and even an apologist for regicide, who witnessed the complete collapse of his revolutionary endeavors, yet composed his great epic Paradise Lost (1667) under the restored monarchy as a blind pariah, unbowed and unapologetic. Poetical and political liberty were inextricably intertwined for Milton, who, for instance, defended his unrhymed epic as “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.” The Romantics felt Milton best voiced his rebellious virtue, albeit unconsciously, in Paradise Lost’s manifestly magnificent rebel angel, the Hell-doomed yet Heaven-defiant hero of his poetic masterpiece. “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell,” the Romantic poet and artist William Blake concluded, “is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790–93).
Milton’s liberty-loving Romantic heirs, in their turn, quite knowingly joined the Miltonic Devil’s party: Mary Wollstonecraft professed that she, “with conscious dignity, or Satanic pride, turned to hell for sublimer objects” (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792); William Godwin considered “Milton’s devil to be a being of considerable virtue” as one who “saw no sufficient reason for that extreme inequality of rank and power which the creator assumed,” and who for his just revolt “bore his torments with fortitude, because he disdained to be subdued by despotic power” (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793); William Hazlitt lauded Milton’s Satan, for his “daring ambition and fierce passions,” as not only heroic but in fact “the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem” (Lectures on the English Poets, 1818). This “Romantic Satanism” was brought to a pitch by the second-generation Romantics Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, who were castigated as heads of a veritable “Satanic School” on account of their having “rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society” and producing poetic works “characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety” (Robert Southey, Preface to A Vision of Judgement, 1821).
The supercharged accusation of a Satanic School of Romanticism was not at all inaccurate, as Romantic radicals’ Miltonolatry unmistakably involved an accompanying idolization of Milton’s Satan. Shelley employed Satan’s peroration to the fallen angels in Hell—“Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n”—as the dramatic finish to his Declaration of Rights (1812), and later celebrated Milton’s Satan as unsurpassable in “energy and magnificence,” even deeming “Milton’s Devil as a moral being…far superior to his God,” and determining this radical feature of Paradise Lost to be “the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s genius” (A Defence of Poetry, 1821). And as Shelley would go so far as to declare that the “only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan” (Preface to Prometheus Unbound, 1820), Byron would fashion his own Miltonic Lucifer as a profoundly Promethean figure—a prideful, Deity-defiant anti-hero who, albeit with a heavy dash of Byronic melancholia and cynicism, illuminates a path of godlessness as enlightenment and liberation (Cain: A Mystery, 1821). This Byronic Lucifer is a quintessential Romantic figure, a descendant of Paradise Lost’s Devil illustrating what an idol the Miltonic Satan had become for the Romantic age. The tragic creature of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) spoke for many Romantics when he expresses to his coldhearted creator that Paradise Lost’s “picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures” struck a chord with him to the extent that he “considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition.”
The Romantic Satan’s aura of Promethean majesty and nobility was not lost on the era’s Miltonic-minded painters and illustrators, whose ambitious artwork presents no horned or hoofed or grotesquely medieval Devil, but rather what Milton’s dazzling verse envisions: a fallen angel clothed in the beauty and dignity of a classical hero and adorned with the splendor and grandeur of a Grecian god. British Romantic art’s preeminent painter of Milton, Henry Fuseli—who was so fond of illustrating Milton’s Satan that he acquired the Satanic sobriquet “Painter in Ordinary to the Devil”—dedicated an entire decade of his life to a one-man Milton Gallery, and during the early stages of the artist’s work on this great and ill-fated endeavor, his then admirer Wollstonecraft noted, “like Milton he seems quite at home in hell — his Devil will be the hero of the poetic series.” The core significance of Wollstonecraft’s quip—which applies to Fuseli’s fellow Milton illustrators as well—is its highlighting that to be “at home in hell” and to have the Devil “be the hero” is to be, plain and simply, “like Milton.”
Nowhere outside of the Romantic age has there been found such a concentrated rehabilitation, celebration, and implementation of the figure of the fallen angel. The extravagant Miltonic branch of Romanticism and its irreverent, infernal reading of Paradise Lost made for the most radical cultural challenge to the status quo in Western history, and it was spearheaded by some of the most prestigious figures at the heart of the cultural moment that helped shape our modern consciousness and sensibilities. A movement so monumental merits reflection, and The Paradise Lost Library serves to perpetuate its memory, highlight its influence on the cultural milieu today, and keep the Miltonic-Romantic flame kindled.