EpilogueMilton as well as Homer and Dante for some elements of theme and style. Aldous
Huxley evoked the poignant description of Milton’s Samson to set the tone for his
novel, Eyeless in Gaza. Clifford Odets used the title Paradise Lost for a 1934 play in
which a family is dispossessed from their little Eden – their home – by the forces of
capitalism and the Depression; it contains a very minor character called Milton,
who lisps and whose chief business is to define the nature of man as 80 per cent
alkaline and 20 percent acid. In his poem Skunk Hour Robert Lowell imports Sa-
tan’s line to characterize the mood of his speaker: “I myself am hell.” In his poem
Adam and Eve Karl Shapiro alludes to Milton’s scenes of Adam’s longing and Eve’s
creation to rewrite the story of their union. And in the mode of tribute, Jorge Luis
Borges’ poem entitled A Rose and Milton voices a poignant wish that some rose
Milton once “held before his face, but could / Not see” might, for that association,
be spared oblivion.
In the later twentieth century critics and theorists of every stripe – Marxists,
feminists, deconstructionists, new historicists, psychological critics, and more – have
made Milton grist for their several mills. And as the new millennium begins, he is
still a battleground for our culture wars. On the one hand, so strong is the impulse
to reclaim him for orthodoxy that some scholars have denied his authorship of the
heterodox theological treatise, De Doctrina Christiana. On the other hand, critics
writing from a Marxist, cultural materialist, or historicist perspective are interrogat-
ing all his poetry and prose to situate his complex texts more precisely in their
political and cultural milieu, and to examine how they relate to some of the fraught
issues of our time: gender roles, marriage and divorce, imperialism, individualism,
the artist in society. Postmodernist critics value the dividedness and ambiguities of
his texts, the fact that for him truth is not a monolithic closed system but the
dismembered body so graphically described in Areopagitica. Ideological concerns
and critical fashions have changed over three centuries, but what endures is the
response of generation after generation of readers to Milton’s superlative poetry and
to his large vision of the human condition.