‘Creating new flesh on the Demon cold’: Blake's Milton and the Apotheoses of a Poet

Abstract

AbstractTraditional readings of the so‐called ‘Bard's Song’, which opens Milton, construe it as a biographical or historical allegory. To counter such interpretations, I place Blake's poem in the context of a Whiggish literary tradition in which Milton's enthusiastic Protestantism is downplayed, producing a cultural icon who is distanced from the militant expressions of ‘mental fight’ in his prose. Likewise, I identify how poetic apotheoses produced an abstract and disembodied Milton in the guise of a God, an angel or a hero. By a commitment to grotesque realism, Blake's Milton reclaims the enthusiastic and tangibly physical metaphors of Milton's prose. Noting the allusions to Milton's works in the ‘Bard's Song’ suggests a reading of Milton in which Blake portrays a self‐divided poet composing Paradise Lost. Blake's grotesque Milton reverses this process of his apotheosis and reaffirms the renewal of a collective and distinctly physical human body.