Epiloguescribed British colonial rule in the imagery of Satanic pomp and foolish resistance,
citing Milton as one who helped convince him that a republic is the only good
government. Jefferson excerpted some 48 passages from Paradise Lost and Samson
Agonistes in his Commonplace book (many of them dealing with Satan’s revolt),
and in 1776 he called on the antiprelatical tracts in an argument for disestablishing
the Church of England in Virginia. In France, Mirabeau’s Sur La Liberté de la Presse,
which paraphrases or translates much of Areopagitica, was published four times be-
tween 1788 and 1792, and an anonymous treatise on which he collaborated, the
Théorie de la Royauté d’après la doctrine de Milton (1789), undertook to justify the
French Revolution and its aftermath with arguments and extracts from the Defensio
and other Milton tracts. It was republished in 1792 with a preface calling for the
trial and execution of Louis XVI.
The English Romantics celebrated Milton as a prophet and a revolutionary in his
life and in his art; because they set themselves to take up his prophetic mantle, they
were able to respond creatively to his example. Blake’s engagement with Milton
was both pervasive and profound: Blake and his wife sat nude in their garden read-
ing aloud Book IV of Paradise Lost; Blake engaged in visionary conversations with
Milton; and Blake’s striking illustrations of Comus, Paradise Lost and Paradise Re-
gained provide brilliant commentaries on those poems. The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell famously claims Milton for the Devil’s party, understanding Milton’s Satan as a
figure of energy and rebellion; and Blake’s several long, epic-like prophetic poems
bear the impress of Paradise Lost and especially Paradise Regained. His poem Milton
makes that poet an epic hero, one of the angels of the Apocalypse who fell into
errors of selfhood by wronging his wives and daughters, his “emanations,” and who
returns to earth to redeem those errors. Entering the foot of his successor poet–
prophet Blake, Milton is joined with him in the work of building the new Jerusa-
lem “in England’s green & pleasant Land.” For Wordsworth, Milton was also a
powerful inspiration. In his efforts to revive the sonnet genre he looked to the lofty
Miltonic model – “in his hand / The Thing became a trumpet.” He invoked
Milton in his sonnet “London 1802” as an exemplar of steadfast freedom of mind,
noble ideals, virtue, and duty: “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: /
England hath need of thee.” Wordsworth commented astutely and admiringly on
many Milton passages, read his poems aloud with his sister Dorothy, often invoked
his example in discussing issues of poetics, and in The Excursion expressed his epic
aspirations in Miltonic blank verse. In defining “the Mind of Man” as its theme
Wordsworth’s blank verse epic, The Prelude, takes off from the promise of a “para-
dise within” at the end of Paradise Lost. It also finds precedent in Milton’s Proems to
Books I, III, VII, and IX of Paradise Lost, which treat the Bard’s heroic trials in
writing his epic, for a new heroic subject: Wordsworth’s development as man and
poet. The Prelude is dense with verbal and structural echoes and transformations of
Paradise Lost: Helvellyn recalls Eden, the ascent of Snowdon recalls Adam’s ascent
of the highest hill of Paradise, the French Revolution reprises the Fall.