* A devil who's always with us.*. What in Me is Dark : The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost. By Orlando Reade.
Orlando Reade - an English professor at Northeastern University, offers an expansive history of the epic's reception as it was interpreted and then put to use by figures as varied as Thomas Jefferson and Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf and Hannah Arendt.
'' The political vision of Paradise Lost,'' Reade writes, went on to influence ....... revolutionary struggles in America, France, Haiti and elsewhere.''
For those revolutionaries, Satan was sometimes a rebel to be emulated and sometimes a tyrant to be resisted, but Milton's own republican convictions - built on the principle that : '' man over men / He made not lord '' - were unassailable.
An advocate for both free speech and regicide, Milton can seem stunningly contemporary in his politics [ despite being a Puritan, of sorts ], which has made '' Paradise Lost '' ever relevant.
Cast out of America in 1952 as a political subversive, the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James was imprisoned for a time at Ellis Island while he challenged his deportation.
From his cell, James the author of '' Black Jacobins '' [1938] still the seminal history of the Haitian Revolution - had a view of Manhattan's glittering skyline. This episode inspired him to write :
'' Mariners, Renegades and Castaways,'' an unusual book of literary criticism that read the American character through '' Moby-Dick. ''
According to James, there is always an impulse toward American totalitarianism as embodied by someone like the narcissistic and megalomaniacal Captain Ahab, content to use anyone as a means to an end.
Orlando's Reade's enlightening and enthusiastic new book, '' What in Me is Dark :
The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost,'' resurfaces James's work to make the point that, in the Luciferian figure of Ahab, Herman Melville had foreseen the '' rise of a personality who, in championing American values, would lead America astray.''
Melville was an adept reader, and Ahab can be traced directly back to the subject of Reade's study, John Milton and his rendering of Satan in the 17th-century epic ''Paradise Lost.''
This year mark's the 350th anniversary of both Milton's death and the printing of the 12-book edition of ''Paradise Lost.''
A 10,000-line blank verse of retelling of Satan's rebellion against God, the subsequent war in heaven and the temptation of the first couple in the Garden of Eden.
'' Paradise Lost '' is a maximalist doorstop, a touchstone wherein Milton promised '' things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,'' but also a work that, as Dr. Johnson quipped, nobody wished longer.
Yet as Reade emphasizes, '' Paradise Lost '' is also a radical story, a complicated and at times ambivalent testimony about tyranny and resistance, liberty and revolution.
The World Students Society thanks Ed Simon for the Review.
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