{"id":13,"date":"2018-03-16T17:40:17","date_gmt":"2018-03-16T17:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theparadiselostlibrary.com\/?page_id=13"},"modified":"2018-12-13T15:23:47","modified_gmt":"2018-12-13T15:23:47","slug":"milton-the-romantics","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/theparadiselostlibrary.com\/index.php\/about\/milton-the-romantics\/","title":{"rendered":"Milton & the Romantics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a Republican and a bold enquirer into morals and religion.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound<\/em><\/a> (1820)<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/em> (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 \u201can example set, the first in English<\/em>, of ancient liberty recover\u2019d to Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.\u201d The Romantics felt Milton best voiced his rebellious virtue, albeit unconsciously, in Paradise Lost<\/em>\u2019s manifestly magnificent rebel angel, the Hell-doomed yet Heaven-defiant hero of his poetic masterpiece. \u201cThe reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell,\u201d the Romantic poet and artist William Blake concluded, \u201cis because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it\u201d (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell<\/em><\/a>, 1790\u201393).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Milton\u2019s liberty-loving Romantic heirs, in their turn, quite knowingly joined the Miltonic Devil\u2019s party: Mary Wollstonecraft professed that she, \u201cwith conscious dignity, or Satanic pride, turned to hell for sublimer objects\u201d (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman<\/em><\/a>, 1792); William Godwin considered \u201cMilton\u2019s devil to be a being of considerable virtue\u201d as one who \u201csaw no sufficient reason for that extreme inequality of rank and power which the creator assumed,\u201d and who for his just revolt \u201cbore his torments with fortitude, because he disdained to be subdued by despotic power\u201d (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice<\/em><\/a>, 1793); William Hazlitt lauded Milton\u2019s Satan, for his \u201cdaring ambition and fierce passions,\u201d as not only heroic but in fact \u201cthe most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem\u201d (Lectures on the English Poets<\/em><\/a>, 1818). This \u201cRomantic Satanism\u201d was brought to a pitch by the second-generation Romantics Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, who were castigated as heads of a veritable \u201cSatanic School\u201d on account of their having \u201crebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society\u201d and producing poetic works \u201ccharacterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety\u201d (Robert Southey, Preface to A Vision of Judgement<\/em><\/a>, 1821).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s peroration to the fallen angels in Hell\u2014\u201cAwake, arise, or be for ever fall\u2019n\u201d\u2014as the dramatic finish to his Declaration of Rights<\/em><\/a> (1812), and later celebrated Milton\u2019s Satan as unsurpassable in \u201cenergy and magnificence,\u201d even deeming \u201cMilton\u2019s Devil as a moral being\u2026far superior to his God,\u201d and determining this radical feature of Paradise Lost<\/em> to be \u201cthe most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton\u2019s genius\u201d (A Defence of Poetry<\/em><\/a>, 1821). And as Shelley would go so far as to declare that the \u201conly imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan\u201d (Preface to Prometheus Unbound<\/em><\/a>, 1820), Byron would fashion his own Miltonic Lucifer as a profoundly Promethean figure\u2014a 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<\/em><\/a>, 1821). This Byronic Lucifer is a quintessential Romantic figure, a descendant of Paradise Lost<\/em>\u2019s Devil illustrating what an idol the Miltonic Satan had become for the Romantic age. The tragic creature of Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus<\/em><\/a> (1818) spoke for many Romantics when he expresses to his coldhearted creator that Paradise Lost<\/em>\u2019s \u201cpicture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures\u201d struck a chord with him to the extent that he \u201cconsidered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Romantic Satan\u2019s aura of Promethean majesty and nobility was not lost on the era\u2019s Miltonic-minded painters and illustrators, whose ambitious artwork presents no horned or hoofed or grotesquely medieval Devil, but rather what Milton\u2019s 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\u2019s preeminent painter of Milton, Henry Fuseli\u2014who was so fond of illustrating Milton\u2019s Satan<\/a> that he acquired the Satanic sobriquet \u201cPainter in Ordinary to the Devil\u201d\u2014dedicated an entire decade of his life to a one-man Milton Gallery, and during the early stages of the artist\u2019s work on this great and ill-fated endeavor, his then admirer Wollstonecraft noted, \u201clike Milton he seems quite at home in hell \u2014 his Devil will be the hero of the poetic series.\u201d The core significance of Wollstonecraft\u2019s quip\u2014which applies to Fuseli\u2019s fellow Milton illustrators as well\u2014is its highlighting that to be \u201cat home in hell\u201d and to have the Devil \u201cbe the hero\u201d is to be, plain and simply, \u201clike Milton.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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<\/em> Library<\/strong> serves to perpetuate its memory, highlight its influence on the cultural milieu today, and keep the Miltonic-Romantic flame kindled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a Republican and a bold enquirer into morals and religion.\u201d \u2014 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… <\/p>\n

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