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Paradise lost satan7/29/2023 ![]() 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. And it is because he is essentially human that Johnson is mistaken in claiming that the poem lacks human interest: we are interested in Satan because Satan is like us.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. Thus, I explicitly argue for a claim that Satanists either gloss over or simply assume: Satan is essentially human. In so doing, I advance the Satanist critics' understanding of Satan by demonstrating that when all these particular features of Satan's character are taken together he can be seen as an exceptional human being. Though I align myself with some of the Satanists I discuss in the opening chapter, I also distinguish myself from them by first providing a distinct description of the specific nature of Satan's consciousness, will, reason, and passion. ![]() In making this argument, I take issue with early anti-Satanists, such as Dryden, Addison, Blair, and Johnson, and later anti-Satanists, such as Williams, Lewis, Musgrove, and Fish who fail to recognise Satan's exceptional human qualities, especially his reason. I justify this claim by treating each of these attributes in separate chapters (the first chapter documents both consciousness and will). After identifying the Satanist and anti-Satanist schools in this tradition and some of the general features of each school, I proceed to argue my central claim: by virtue of his consciousness, will, reason, and passion, Satan is a character whose nature is not in fact supernatural but fundamentally and essentially the same as that of an exceptional human being. I begin by observing how major critics and poets from Dryden on have understood this wonderful yet controversial character in Milton's greatest poem. The subject of this thesis is Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost.
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