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.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.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 the^( )seventeenth
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.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."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.
 
