Orlando Reade, author of What in Me Is Dark—the Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost
What was John Milton’s relationship with the English Revolution?
By the end of the 1630s, Milton believed that the Church of England bishops were a threat to the liberty of protestant English people.
This was the bedrock of his radical politics. Religious freedom was very closely connected to the idea of freedom to be a poet. Poets needed to be free to interpret scripture, and free to write poetry.
His first writings were explicitly against the power of the bishops, but not yet explicitly against the king. But his beliefs led him to take the side of parliament against king Charles I when the English Civil War broke out in 1642.
By the time the king was tried for treason and executed in 1649, Milton was already known to be a useful and learned political writer.
The new regime gave him a job as the “Secretary of Foreign Tongues”. He was writing and translating diplomatic correspondence and writing important propaganda.
He justified the king’s execution. He had amassed a whole arsenal of arguments about why the execution of a king was not only necessary but justified.
When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton was persecuted. In Paradise Lost, he is wrestling with the defeat of his revolution. Is that how you see the poem?
Milton said that in Paradise Lost he was justifying the ways of god to man. He wrote the poem after the utter defeat of his political cause.
During the Civil War, he set poetry aside. With the restoration of the monarchy, Milton didn’t stop being a vigorous enemy of kings, but he had more time to write poetry. In his last 14 years, he wrote three great works of literature, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.
These are great masterpieces. They explore defeat, but with Milton’s undying commitment to the cause of liberty.
They are the literary expression of political beliefs. At their heart is the idea that human kings are false idols and that liberty is the fundamental human condition.
A whole range of anti-slavery activists drew inspiration from Paradise Lost, from Olaudah Equiano to Frederick Douglass. Was this because of Milton’s defence of freedom?
Slavery was an important part of the afterlife of Paradise Lost. In the 1700s Equiano quotes the poem four times in his biography. Later on, the influence of the poem became much clearer among abolitionists in the United States. Milton was for freedom, but he never explicitly condemned slavery.
The abolitionists had to radicalise Milton, to use his work in a critical way, to push him to conclusions he did not actually reach. This is how literature can be repurposed for our own political movements.
I learned from your book that Malcolm X drew inspiration from Milton. How did that come about?
Malcolm X read Paradise Lost in the late 1940s when he was a young man serving a long sentence for burglary. He had this desire to read, combined with a deep suspicion of white writers.
Malcolm X was trying to bend the literature to make it serve his new radical viewpoint. When he came to Paradise Lost, Malcolm also perceived something that was true.
Milton compared Satan on his way to Eden to European ships on their way to satisfy their appetite for sugar, spice and tobacco. Malcolm saw how Milton associated Satan with European kings and their armies, with the colonisers. Malcolm found something profoundly radical in Milton’s critique of worldly power. He found in Paradise Lost a critique of white supremacy.
You describe how Paradise Lost has influenced radicals right up to the 2011 Arab Spring. Should we all read it?
My book is for people who have read Paradise Lost and those who haven’t. I guide the reader through the poems because great art is for everyone.
It is true that Milton is intimidating. But with a little help, many more people could read and enjoy it. Milton believed it would be read by the “fit reader and few”, but he was wrong.
It has been circulated by men and women, by black and white, by Muslim and Christian, among those who did not have the classical education Milton had. The long afterlife of Paradise Lost shows that the poem has something to teach all of us.
- What in Me Is Dark—The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade
