April 27
Milton and the Most Dangerous Poem Ever Written
On April 27, 1667, blind, impoverished, and fortunate to be alive, John Milton sold the rights to Paradise Lost for £5 … and it immediately became a masterpiece.
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He dictated
it in the dark.
By 1658, when
John Milton began composing Paradise Lost in earnest, he had been completely
blind for six years. He had lost his first wife. His second wife had died in
childbirth. He had spent the better part of two decades as the English
Republic's propagandist—Secretary for Foreign Tongues to Cromwell's Council of
State, author of the Latin defenses of regicide that had been read across
Europe, the man whose pen had justified the execution of a king. And then
Cromwell died, the Commonwealth collapsed, Charles II was restored to the
throne, and Milton's books were burned in the street while a warrant was issued
for his arrest.
He hid.
Friends interceded—Andrew Marvell among them, now an MP with connections to the
new court. Milton was arrested, briefly imprisoned, and then released under the
general pardon of 1660. He was spared execution, most likely because of his age
and his blindness. He retired, married again, and began to dictate the poem he
had been planning since his twenties.
He composed
at night, when the rhythms came to him, and dictated each morning to whichever
assistant or family member was available—his three daughters among them, though
their relationship with their father was complicated and not always willing. He
held the vast architecture of the poem in his head, unable to see a single word
of it on the page, working in darkness toward a vision of ten thousand lines.
He called this process being milked: the poem built up overnight, and each
morning he gave it over.
On April 27, 1667, he signed a contract with the printer Samuel Simmons at the Golden Lion in Aldersgate Street. Simmons paid him £5 immediately, with a further £5 to follow when 1,300 copies sold out. The first edition sold out in eighteen months. Milton and his widow eventually earned £28 total from the greatest epic poem in the English language. Simmons later sold the rights for £25 to another publisher. Jacob Tonson eventually acquired them and built a small fortune.
Karl Marx,
who noticed everything, noted the transaction with characteristic precision: “Milton
produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his
own nature.” He contrasted this with the literary proletarian who writes at the
behest of a publisher. Milton, Marx argued, was neither a productive nor an
unproductive worker in the economic sense. He was something else entirely: a
force of nature that had overflowed into print.
Milton’s Agenda
To understand
Paradise Lost, you have to understand what Milton had done in the decade before
he wrote it—and what had been done to him in return.
Milton was
born in 1608 to a prosperous London family, educated at Cambridge, and spent
six years after graduation reading every major work of literature in several
languages. He published a handful of poems of extraordinary quality—Lycidas,
L'Allegro, Il Penseroso—and planned, at length, a great national
epic. Then the Civil War intervened, and Milton discovered he was a political
animal as much as a poet. He wrote pamphlets arguing for divorce based on
incompatibility, scandalizing London. He wrote Areopagitica, the most
passionate defense of freedom of the press in the English language. He wrote TheTenure of Kings and Magistrates in 1649, six weeks after the execution of
Charles I, arguing that the people have not only the right but the duty to hold
tyrants to account—and that Charles had been a tyrant. The argument influenced
Thomas Jefferson. The pamphlet earned Milton the job of defending the regicide
to Europe in Latin.
He believed every word of it. He was not a propagandist who privately doubted his cause. He was a man whose deepest convictions—about liberty, about the corruption of established authority, about the right of conscience to resist tyranny—aligned perfectly with the republic he served. When it fell, he did not recant. He kept writing republican pamphlets even as Charles II's return became inevitable, one of the very last voices still arguing the lost cause as the army marched on London. Then the Restoration came and the books were burned and the warrant was issued.
Milton was lucky
to survive, and he knew it. And he turned inward, to the poem that had been
waiting for twenty years, and began to dictate in the dark a work about the
nature of rebellion and obedience, the rights of the individual against divine
authority, the consequences of pride, and the question of whether the first
angel to say no was a villain or a hero.
The Phrase That Lasted
The poem
opens in Hell. Satan—Lucifer, the brightest of the angels, the one who led the
rebellion against God and lost—is lying on a burning lake, newly cast down. He
rises. He organizes his fallen angels. He gives the speech that has haunted the
Western literary tradition for three and a half centuries.
“Better to
reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
Milton
intended this as the statement of a villain. He structured the entire
twelve-book poem to demonstrate that Satan's defiance is ultimately
self-destructive, that his rebellion is grounded in pride and envy rather than
legitimate grievance, that his apparent grandeur diminishes steadily throughout
the poem as he becomes, step by step, serpentine—first a tempter, then
literally a snake, crawling on the ground while his followers hiss. The Satan
of Book I is “magnificent”; the Satan of Book X is an embarrassment. Milton
meant to show that fall.
But the Satan of Book I is so elegantly written that readers since the seventeenth century have had difficulty caring about what happens in Book X. William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, delivered the verdict that has defined critical debate ever since: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.”
Blake's
reading is not a misreading, exactly. It is a reading against the grain—a
recognition that the poem's imaginative energy distributes itself unequally,
that the character Milton gave the most psychological depth, the most
compelling rhetoric, the most genuine interiority is the one he intended as the
villain. Percy Bysshe Shelley in A Defense of Poetry went further: “Nothing
can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed
in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have
been intended for the popular personification of evil.” Shelley praised
specifically what he called Satan's “refusal to bow even in defeat”—the quality
that most readers who have loved the poem recognize as the poem's deepest
source of energy.
The question
that both Blake and Shelley are really asking is: what happens when a poet who
spent twenty years arguing that rebellion against tyrannical authority is not
only justified but holy sits down to write a poem about the rebel who said
Better to reign in Hell? The answer, apparently, is that he writes the rebel
magnificently.
A Purloined Political Allegory
To Modern
Occultist, the theological layer of Paradise Lost is only the
beginning. The poem operates simultaneously on at least three registers: the
biblical, the political, and the psychological—and the political layer, once
you see it, cannot be unseen.
Milton wrote
Paradise Lost seven years after the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. He had
spent two decades defending the republic against the king. He had seen the
republic fail and the king's son return. He could not say what he believed in
plain language—the regime that had burned his books was still in power. So he
said it in the only language available to him: a theological epic about the
nature of rebellion, authority, and the fall from power.
Satan, the
brilliant leader who convinces a third of Heaven to follow him against divine
authority, organizes his rebels in council, and refuses to submit even in total
defeat—reads, unmistakably, as a Cromwellian figure. Not Cromwell himself,
necessarily, but the revolutionary spirit, the republican energy that Milton
had served and that had ultimately been crushed. The fallen angels debating in
Pandemonium echo the debates of the Long Parliament. God's monarchy in Heaven
is absolute in the way Charles II's was meant to be—and Milton's God is, as
both Shelley and modern readers have noted, not always easy to like. Satan's
complaint that God rules by arbitrary decree rather than merit—that obedience
is demanded rather than earned—mirrors exactly the republican critique of
divine right monarchy that Milton had spent his career advancing.
Milton was
writing the political argument he could no longer make directly, in the only
form available to a blind, imprisoned, pardoned former propagandist of a failed
republic: mythology. The Fall of Man is also the fall of the English
Commonwealth. The expulsion from Paradise is also the return of Charles II. The
angel Michael, at the poem's end, tells Adam that the loss of Eden need not be
a final defeat—that the individual soul can build 'a Paradise within thee,
happier far.' It is the consolation of a man who has seen every external
paradise lost and must find another kind.
The Occultist's View
The Western
esoteric tradition has its own relationship with Milton's Satan, and it is
considerably more complicated than either orthodox theology or Romantic
sympathy suggests.
In the
Gnostic and Hermetic traditions, the rebellion against the Demiurge—the blind
creator god who built the material world without understanding its spiritual
purpose—is not merely permitted but necessary. The Gnostic spark that knows its
divine origin cannot remain passive within the material prison. It must resist,
ascend, escape. In this framework, the figure who says 'I will not serve' to
the divine authority of the lower world is not a villain but a necessary agent
of liberation. The serpent in the Garden is, in several Gnostic traditions, not
the deceiver but the revealer—the one who offers the knowledge that the
Demiurge has forbidden because genuine knowledge threatens his dominion.
Milton would
have been appalled by this reading. He was a serious Puritan Protestant who
believed, without irony, that he was justifying the ways of God to men. But the
esoteric tradition has never been particularly respectful of authorial
intention. Eliphas Lévi, the nineteenth century occultist who did more than
anyone to systematize the Hermetic revival, understood Satan as the “astral
light”—the universal magnetic force, the agent of transformation, neither
purely evil nor purely good but the raw creative energy that animates matter.
Anton LaVey, in the Satanic Bible of 1969, explicitly repurposed Milton's Satan
as the patron of individualism, self-assertion, and refusal to
submit—extracting the Romantic reading into a philosophical system. The Church
of Satan's whole program is, in a real sense, Milton read through Blake.
The Thelemic
tradition, with its central axiom of “Do What Thou Wilt,” resonates with the
Miltonic Satan's core principle: that obedience to external authority at the
expense of one's own will is the deepest form of spiritual degradation. Crowley
understood this. The Luciferian current in Western occultism—Light-bearer, morning
star, Prometheus with a different name—draws its literary power almost entirely
from the figure Milton created in Books I and II of Paradise Lost, the
fallen angel who stands in the burning lake and refuses.
The Poem in the Dark
Milton died
in November 1674, seven years after selling the copyright. He was sixty-five,
which was considered old in the seventeenth century, and had been in poor
health for years. He died of gout, which he bore with characteristic stoicism,
dictating to the last. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes had
both been published in 1671—the former a calmer, more austere sequel, the
latter a tragedy about a blinded man in captivity who brings the temple down on
his captors. The autobiographical resonances of Samson were not lost on
contemporary readers and have never been lost since.
The poem sold
well, was immediately recognized as something extraordinary, and has never gone
out of print. Johnson called it “a poem which with respect to design may claim
the first place, and with respect to performance the second, among the
productions of the human mind”—the oblique but genuine acknowledgment that only
Shakespeare exceeded it in execution. Blake made it the central text of his
entire mythological system. Wordsworth and Keats and Hardy and T.S. Eliot and
Philip Pullman—the line of writers who have argued with Paradise Lost or
borrowed from it or been haunted by it runs unbroken from 1667 to the present.
The publisher
who bought it for £5 did not include his own name on the title page, “unwilling
to be openly associated with Milton or the publication lest it failed.” That
publisher is not remembered; the blind man who dictated it in the dark is.
“The mind is
its own place,” Satan tells his fallen angels in Book I, “and in itself can
make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
That was
truly Milton speaking, as he’d been living within his own inner Heaven and Hell
for years.
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