John Milton
1608–1674 · England
“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
#13of 111Best Authors
Influence92nd pct
Popularity69th pct
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
Influence
The lineage through John Milton
Drew From(9)
who shaped John Milton
- Paradise Lost is Milton rewriting Genesis 1–3 as epic — the same Creation, the same temptation, the same exile from Eden
- Book I leans directly on the forbidden tree of Genesis 2:16–17; the spine of Milton's poem is the spine of those opening chapters
- Read Genesis first and you'll feel exactly where Milton is faithful and where he invents — the silences he chose to fill are the whole poem
VirgilAncient Rome
via The Aeneid
- Paradise Lost is the Aeneid recast for Heaven and Hell — Milton took Virgil's twelve-book architecture and his every epic convention
- The invocation, the start in the middle of the action, the towering similes: all Virgilian inheritance, working in English
- Read the Aeneid first and you see the classical scaffolding Milton raised his fallen angels upon
via Revelation
- The War in Heaven at the epic's heart comes straight out of Revelation 12 — it survives nowhere else in scripture
- Michael against the great dragon is John's image; Milton stages it as the climax of his cosmic civil war
- But he changes the ending: John crowns Michael, Milton crowns the Son in the chariot — reading Revelation first shows you exactly where Milton honored the source and where he overruled it
- Paradise Lost is Milton's bid to surpass Homer — the invocation, the in-medias-res opening, and the War in Heaven all reach straight back to the Iliad
- The roll call of devils answers the Catalogue of Ships; the similes are Homeric machinery turned to Christian ends
- Read the Iliad first and you'll catch what Milton is doing with Satan: dressing him in Achilles' martial glory in order to expose it as damnation
- The Satan you know — the fallen morning-star, proud and ruined — is Milton reading Isaiah 14:12
- "How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning" gave Milton both the image and the name; the identification of Lucifer with Satan is largely Paradise Lost's doing
- Read Isaiah first and the source of Milton's grandest character is hiding in a single prophetic verse
Christopher MarloweRenaissance
via Dr. Faustus
- Satan's hell-within-the-self was Marlowe's idea first
- His "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell" (Book IV) echoes Faustus's "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it" — scholars treat Marlowe's damned scholar as a direct source for Milton's fallen angel
- Read Dr. Faustus and you hear the earlier voice standing behind Satan's interior torment
OvidAncient Rome
via Metamorphoses
- Milton's Eden is built partly from Ovid — the simile for paradise traces to Proserpine gathering flowers, and Eve at the pool is Ovid's Narcissus rewritten
- The Sin-and-Death allegory of Book II runs Ovidian metamorphosis into the realm of the demonic
- Reading the Metamorphoses first lets you see Milton's allusive layer — the pagan transformations he stitched into a Christian creation
UnknownBible
via Tobit
- Paradise Lost names Tobit outright: Satan's thwarted desire for Eve is likened to Asmodeus, the demon the fishy fume drove from Tobit's son's bride (IV.167-71)
- Milton's angel Raphael is the same Raphael who "deign'd to travel with Tobias" in Tobit
- Read the short, strange book of Tobit and you'll catch the allusions Milton expected you to know
- Milton's faithful angels fight in Ephesians 6's "armour of God" — Michael's sword drawn "from the armoury of God" marks their panoply as spiritual, against the merely Homeric weaponry of Satan's host
- The whole War in Heaven is Paul's "spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" given a literal battlefield
- Read Ephesians first and Milton's angels reveal themselves as the church militant in arms
Inspired(11)
who John Milton shaped
- No later poet wrestled with Milton harder than Blake — he read Paradise Lost as a poem at war with itself
- Blake's famous verdict: Milton was "a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it" — Satan is too alive, God too cold, and Blake noticed
- His illuminated epic Milton is a sustained re-vision of Paradise Lost, and he engraved twelve illustrations to it besides
Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyRomantics
via Frankenstein
- Milton's epic is the moral skeleton inside Mary Shelley's monster
- Frankenstein's epigraph is Adam's lament from Paradise Lost Book X — "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man..."
- The Creature literally finds and reads a copy of Paradise Lost, casting himself first as Adam, then — abandoned and enraged — as Satan
- Milton's Satan is the secret blueprint for Captain Ahab — grand, ruined, and magnificent in defiance
- Melville's reading of Paradise Lost in 1849–50 is when scholars date Ahab's conception; he annotated his own copy as the novel took shape
- Listen for it in Ahab's own words — "proud as Lucifer," "damned in the midst of Paradise"
- After Coleridge, Milton was Wordsworth's greatest idol — and Paradise Lost was the model he measured himself against
- The Prelude is a deliberate Miltonic blank-verse epic, recast as the story of a lost paradise and its recovery inside a single mind
- The allusions are insistent, inviting the comparison — Wordsworth wanted you to hear Milton behind him
Charlotte BrontëVictorian
via Jane Eyre
- Milton's epic is the text Jane Eyre argues with — scholarly consensus reads the novel as a feminist revision of Paradise Lost, retold from Eve's perspective
- Rochester quotes it directly (the "fallen serpent of the abyss"), and he and Jane trade Miltonic allusions in what reads like a verbal tennis game
- Brontë even paints Jane's vision of Death in Milton's own words, quoting Paradise Lost's Book 2 verbatim
- Milton's epic machinery, shrunk to the scale of a hairpin
- Pope built his mock-epic by burlesquing Paradise Lost: Belinda's premonitory morning dream echoes Eve's dream, and Umbriel's flight to the Cave of Spleen mirrors Satan's journey to the new world
- The sylph whispering at Belinda's ear is Satan tempting Eve, miniaturized for a drawing-room — the grander you take Milton, the funnier Pope gets
Thomas HardyVictorian
- Milton supplied Hardy the frame for a fall out of Eden
- In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Alec tells Tess outright, 'You are Eve, and I am the other old one, come to tempt you' — and Hardy quotes Satan's seduction of Eve straight from Paradise Lost (9.626-31)
- The temptation Milton dramatized as the loss of paradise becomes, in Hardy's hands, a country girl's ruin — same archetype, no Heaven to fall from
Thomas PaineEnlightenment
via Common Sense
- A century after Milton, his Satan turned up in American revolutionary pamphlets
- Paine quotes Paradise Lost by name — Satan's "never can true reconcilement grow / where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep" (IV.98–99)
- He aims Milton's line at Britain: after the bloodshed, the colonies can no more make peace with the crown than the fallen angels with Heaven
Emily BrontëVictorian
- Milton was essential reading in the Brontë house — Rev. Patrick considered him indispensable, and Miltonic echoes run through the children's juvenilia
- The Romantic reading of Milton's Satan — proud, magnetic, damned and unrepentant — is the mold Heathcliff is cast in, by way of Byron's Manfred
- Catherine's dream of being flung out of heaven borrows Paradise Lost's geography of exile and damnation
Ralph Waldo EmersonTranscendentalists
- When Emerson built his roll of the self-reliant in Self-Reliance, Milton made the cut by name — set alongside Moses and Plato as men who 'spoke not what men but what they thought'
- Two centuries on, Milton reads less as a poet of obedience than as Emerson's model of the mind that trusts itself over books and tradition
- Emerson lectured on Milton and wrote an essay on him before the great essays — Paradise Lost sits behind that idea of the original soul
- Coleridge lectured formally on Paradise Lost and dissected Milton's Satan in the Biographia Literaria — he had Milton on the brain
- He "had Milton's career very much in mind" drafting the Rime, which inherits the Miltonic fall-and-curse arc
- The Mariner's guilt-and-redemption — and that ghastly Death / Life-in-Death pair — answer Milton's Satan and his allegory of Sin and Death
In their words
Famous Quotes
“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
“Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe.”
“They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way.”
Biography
About John Milton
English poet and intellectual, author of Paradise Lost, the greatest epic poem in the English language. A fierce defender of free speech and republican government, he served as Latin Secretary under Cromwell. He composed his masterpiece while blind, dictating it to amanuenses. His influence on English poetry is second only to Shakespeare's.
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