Epilogue:
“Something... Written to
Aftertimes”
Milton has probably had a greater influence on major poets and writers over a
longer period of time than any other English literary figure except Shakespeare.
Later readers and writers looked to him for a powerful formulation of the great
biblical myths of Western civilization: the garden state of innocence, Satan or the
embodiment of evil, the Fall of humankind, and, assimilated to them, the classical
myths of the Golden Age, Pandora, Flora, Prosperine, Scylla and Charybdis,
Prometheus, and Creation out of Chaos. Indeed, many readers virtually conflated
Milton’s portrayal of Eden and the Fall with the Genesis account. Also, Milton was
seen to have established literary norms and styles: Harold Bloom claims that English
poets from Dryden to T. S. Eliot looked upon Milton as a daunting father figure,
who set them a standard of imaginative force and eloquent expression which they
felt compelled to imitate or adapt or rebel against.^1 Moreover, subsequent writers
sought in Milton their own theological, political and cultural ideals, prompting
conflict from the outset between orthodox and reformist versions of Milton’s legacy.
His influence soon spread beyond anglophone countries through translations of
Paradise Lost and some other poems and treatises into Dutch, French, Italian, Ger-
man, Russian, and Polish, and more recently, Chinese and Japanese. Also, his po-
ems influenced artists in other media. From 1688 onward Paradise Lost and sometimes
other Milton poems provided a stimulus for distinguished illustrations, of which
Blake’s are masterpieces. Handel composed an oratorio on texts from Samson Agonistes.
He also composed a three-part secular oratorio with texts from L’Allegro and Il
Penseroso and a characteristically eighteenth-century conclusion, Il Moderato; in the
late twentieth century Mark Morris added a ballet to that Handel work. Milton’s
epic also supplied inspiration, and the libretto, for an impressive opera entitled
Paradise Lost by the twentieth-century Polish composer Penderecki.
Milton’s younger contemporary, Dryden, acknowledged his impact by imita-
tion, praise, appropriation, and ideological revision. Into The State of Innocence, his