“I have often imagined that it might be possible to bring about a Milton-Society…in order to perpetuate His Ideas: but at present…I can neither form nor properly digest a scheme of that kind.”
— Henry Fuseli, 1800
The Paradise Lost Library is a virtual resource dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of British Romanticism’s rich Miltonic branch.
By the Romantic age, Milton had joined Shakespeare as a twin pillar of British culture, and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) loomed large over the creative output of the era. Yet Milton’s Christian epic poem on the Fall of Man, while intended to “justify the ways of God to men,” inadvertently gave rise to a sympathetic and sublime Satan, who curiously holds pride of place in the Puritan poet’s magnum opus. Paradise Lost thus became especially appealing to the counterculture—to those Romantic rebels who, like Milton’s Satan in his heroic struggle against what he decries as “the tyranny of Heaven,” were at odds with an oppressive and seemingly unshakeable establishment.
Milton, an antimonarchical revolutionary in his own right, was in the words of Romantic poet and artist William Blake “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790–93). Milton’s liberty-loving Romantics heirs, in their turn, quite knowingly joined the Miltonic Devil’s party. (See Milton & the Romantics.) Amidst the sociopolitical turbulence of the turn of the nineteenth century, Milton’s Satan—the apostate angel who aspired above his station in courageous self-assertion and, dauntlessly defiant against all odds, staked his flag on the burning marl of Hell—was celebrated as the true hero of Paradise Lost and a dynamic icon of noble resistance to despotic power, the Romantics mobilizing the Miltonic Satan as such in their own work.
This phenomenon of “Romantic Satanism”—as the most singular strand of Romanticism’s cult of Milton is known—emerged organically from the collective contributions of various Romantic titans, from prose writers (Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Hazlitt) and poets (Blake, Shelley, Byron) who fashioned the fallen angel as a Promethean standard-bearer for the unfettered human spirit, to painters and illustrators (Fuseli, Barry, Lawrence, Blake) who rendered the archangelic arch-rebel as a truly magnificent figure—a fallen but godlike Lucifer, clothed in the beauty and dignity of a classical hero and adorned with the splendor and grandeur of a Grecian god.
As the so-called “Romantic Satanists” observed, it was a transformation invited—or rather insisted upon—by Paradise Lost itself. “As to the Devil,” noted Percy Bysshe Shelley, “he owes everything to Milton,” as it was after all none other than Milton himself who “divested him of a sting, hoofs, and horns, clothed him with the sublime grandeur of a graceful but tremendous spirit—and restored him to the society” (Essay on the Devil and Devils, ca. 1819–20). For the Romantics, to restore luster to the fallen Lucifer’s much tarnished name and image was to follow in the footsteps of Milton—in Shelley’s words, “the sacred Milton” (Preface to Prometheus Unbound, 1820).
The Paradise Lost Library follows in the footsteps of Milton and the Romantics, taking up the torch by preserving and celebrating the history, poetry, prose, and illustrations produced by this remarkably rich, grand, and groundbreaking Miltonic-Romantic tradition. Spearheaded by some of the most prestigious figures at the heart of the cultural moment that helped shape our modern consciousness and sensibilities, this 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. 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.