“... And On His Crest Sat Horror”: Eighteenth Century Interpretations of Milton's Sublimity and His Satan

Abstract

Milton's reputation in the eighteenth century has already been so thoroughly examined that another article on the subject must seem superfluous. I am however less concerned with Milton and his influence on literary practice than with the development of certain ideas which played an important part in the evolution of Romanticism and readily found illustration in his work. Few of us still believe that the paradoxical interpretation of Paradise Lost set forth by Blake and Shelley, expanded by other early nineteenth-century writers, and given respectability by Sir Walter Raleigh, sprang fully-armed from the miraculous marriage of Heaven and Hell effected by Romantic inspiration over the dead body of Neo-classicism. We understand nineteenth-century Romanticism better through seeing it as the fruit of a steady (though complex) growth. I propose to trace and document two minor elements in this complexity which have not, I think, received much attention: the interpretation of Milton's sublimity, and of his Satan. Such a study should throw some indirect light on our own interpretation of Paradise Lost; but its purpose is to examine the emergence of the romantic attitude from the neo-classical, not in aesthetic theory or literary practice, but in one specific critical instance.