How Self-Reliance and Nature drew on Paradise Lost
A documented line of influence: Ralph Waldo Emerson demonstrably engaged John Milton’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Paradise Lost
John Milton · 1667
RenaissanceThe influenced
Self-Reliance and Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1844
RomanticismRelevance
6/10
On Self-Reliance and Nature’s page
- Emerson names Milton outright in Self-Reliance — one of the trio (with Moses and Plato) he holds up as a man who set books and traditions at naught and trusted his own thought
- Paradise Lost is the work that earned Milton that place: the great act of one mind composing its own cosmos
- Read it first and you see what Emerson is pointing at — self-reliance isn't a slogan here, it's Milton's whole posture
On Paradise Lost’s page
- 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