He’s also a self-made individualist setting out into the wilderness to make his own world anew. Milton writes, “But all was false and hollow though his tongue / Dropp’d manna, and could make the worse appear / The better reason.” Lucifer is a confidence man, rebel, and supposed advocate of liberty. Much as Lucifer invades Eden like the frontiersman who moved ever further west, he is also capable of justifying his actions with the most exalted of language. Lawrence’s pessimistic appraisal of the American character doubles as an apt description of Paradise Lost’s central antagonist. It has never yet melted.” The novelist had in mind not just the pioneer clearing lands that do not belong to him, but also the honey-worded con man who can justify his crimes in the sweetest language. Lawrence, remarked in his under-read 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature that, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. Milton’s fellow countryman, the novelist D.H. In other words, he’s a thoroughly modern man, and in a country as preoccupied with modernity as the United States is, he’s arguably an honorary “American” as a result. Milton’s Lucifer is neither bestial, a reptilian Other, nor the goofy incompetent of a medieval morality play rather, he’s a conflicted, brooding, alienated, narcissistic self-mythologizer. Paradise Lost expands on the Bible’s minimalist account, while altering received cultural representations of the devil. And though the epic’s length may have inspired Samuel Johnson to quip “None ever wished it longer,” part of the maximalist brilliance of the poem is the universe it contains, which reflects Milton’s immense erudition, ranging from the astronomy of Galileo to the subject of Lapland witches. What Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first version of which was published in 1667, also demonstrates is what can be so dangerous about mistaking an antihero for a hero.īut first, a reminder on the poem’s narrative: Across some ten thousand lines, Milton writes “hings unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” by retelling the Genesis story of “Man’s disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise.” The poet recounts the aftermath of the war in Heaven, Lucifer’s fall to Hell, and his ultimate tempting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Nothing demonstrates that inclination more than the long-standing appeal the charismatic Lucifer has had for audiences, an appeal mirrored by the flawed but alluring protagonists of some of TV’s greatest American dramas. Milton may be a poet of individual liberty and conscience, but he was also one of the most brilliant theological explorers of the darker subjects of sin, depravity, and the inclination toward evil. Many of the values the archangel advocates in Paradise Lost-the self-reliance, the rugged individualism, and even manifest destiny-are regarded as quintessentially American in the cultural imagination. In light of this, it’s little surprise Milton’s Lucifer can be read as a kind of modern, American antihero, invented before such a concept really existed. In 1845, Rufus Griswold wrote that Milton was “more emphatically American than any author who has lived in the United States.” More recently, the author Nigel Smith claimed in his cheekily titled 2008 book Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? that “Milton is an author for all Americans … because his visionary writing is a literary embodiment of so many of the aspirations that have guided Americans.” Indeed, America seemed prefigured in Milton’s pamphlets, from Eikonoklastes, which celebrated regicide, to Areopagitica, which advocated for freedom of speech. That’s in part because literary critics have decked Lucifer’s creator himself in red, white, and blue bunting since the 19th century. Curiously, the deeply modern Lucifer could also be considered one of the greatest characters in American literature, even though he was created more than a century before the United States was founded. Feared by Puritans, fêted by Romantics, and reinvented by everybody else, Milton’s fallen archangel has worn many different masks over the centuries, from Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab to television’s Tony Soprano and Walter White. Three hundred and fifty years ago, the poet John Milton wrote one of the greatest characters in all of British literature: Lucifer, the antagonist of the epic poem Paradise Lost.
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