October 15, 2024
A powerful poem endures. British literary scholar Reade makes his book debut with a fresh consideration of the long and surprising afterlife of John Milton's epicParadise Lost, published in 1667, by revealing the poem's effect on readers over time, from colonial America to Wordsworth's Lake District, from Bloomsbury to a New Jersey prison. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Milton's political ideas infused the North American colonies and informed the language of the Declaration of Independence. "With the outbreak of war between Britain and the thirteen colonies, in April 1775," Reade notes, "references to Milton began to sprout like mushrooms after rainfall." Jefferson saw Milton as a radical republican who made the need for throwing off tyranny self-evident. For William Wordsworth, witnessing revolution in France, Milton aroused a fascination with lone revolutionaries, as he did for rebels later in Haiti and Cuba. "In the years leading up to the Arab Spring," Reade reveals, "readers across the Middle East saw in Milton's poetry messages about freedom and totalitarianism." For George Eliot--who admitted to having a crush on the poet--his life and work were inspiration forMiddlemarch, "a horror story about marriage." Milton inspired, too, the 19th-century New Orleans carnival society Mistick Krewe of Comus. Among many other readers Reade considers are abolitionist James Redpath; Virginia Woolf, who mused over the poem in her diary; Hannah Arendt; Malcolm X, who saw in the poem "a radical critique of Western rulers"; and Reade's students in a poetry class he taught at Northern State Prison. Reade helpfully provides historical context and enlightening explications of the poem that, he persuasively asserts, conveys a crucial message: "that the fundamental human condition is one of freedom." Edifying, wide-ranging cultural criticism.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from October 21, 2024
In this excellent debut study, Reade, an English professor at Northeastern University London, traces the legacy of John Milton’s 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost by examining its influence on 12 famous figures. Arguing that Thomas Jefferson related to the depiction of Satan’s revolutionary zeal, Reade notes that while serving as American ambassador to France in the 1780s, the future president wrote that Milton’s unrhyming poetry represented an “expression of freedom” from the fetters of tradition, complementing in style the content of Satan’s speeches against heaven’s tyranny. Elsewhere, Reade describes how George Eliot weaved Paradise Lost references into Middlemarch to draw parallels between protagonist Dorothea Brooke’s disillusionment with her older, scholarly husband, who neglects to support her intellectual potential, and Milton’s unhappy marriage to a younger woman. The most fascinating entries deal with more recent individuals, detailing how Malcolm X saw Milton’s Satan as a stand-in for European Christian colonizers and how Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s mistaken belief that the poem privileges the spiritual over the political misses its antimonarchical message. The bravura closing chapter ties the individuals’ disparate interpretations together by considering them as a fitting realization of Milton’s pluralism. This edifying analysis testifies to the enduring power of literature. Photos. Agent: Kat Aitken, Lexington Literary.
November 1, 2024
Milton's Paradise Lost has inspired and influenced readers for centuries. Reade evaluates that influence through the lenses of 12 readers to illustrate the hidden impact this epic poem has had on history, politics, philosophy, and literature. Thomas Jefferson reflected on Paradise Lost while drafting the Declaration of Independence, posing this crucial question as the largest slave owner in the county, "what society can exist between people who are not equals?" Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison used Milton to identify "the devils in America," while Emerson and the Transcendentalists found God in nature and a kindred spirit in Milton. From Marx to Malcolm X, Milton has long provided a source of reflection for religious and political leaders. William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and George Eliot all acknowledge their debt to Milton. The epigraph to Frankenstein is from Paradise Lost, and Middlemarch's Casaubon is a Milton figure. Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot ushered in Modernism and gave Milton new life. Even James Joyce references Milton when Stephen Dedalus fantasizes about rewriting Paradise Lost as a novel. Reade's fresh appraisal shines throughout.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.