Epiloguein Milton’s poetry: the use of pastoral and the mix of Christian and classical super-
natural elements in Lycidas, the “faults” of language and versification and the want of
human interest in Paradise Lost, and the lack of a “middle” in Samson Agonistes.
Colonial and post-revolutionary Americans embraced Milton as a model of sub-
lime thought and expression, a major source of imitation and quotation, and a
valuable support for orthodoxy in several areas. Schoolmasters illustrated points of
grammar and rhetoric out of his poems, moralists pointed to his Eve and his Garden
of Eden for ideals of womanly virtue and wedded love, ministers cited him to
support their own positions and appropriated his images to tell the Christian story.
Milton’s companion poems prompted a rash of mostly pedestrian mood poems, and
New England poets celebrated the Puritan errand into the Wilderness and the New
World experience in an epic style derived from Milton and Pope. Philip Freneau’s
The Rising Glory of America in blank verse (1772), Timothy Dwight’s The Conquest
of Canaan (1785), and Joel Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus (1787) in heroic cou-
plets reworked images, passages, and episodes from Paradise Lost – the Infernal Coun-
cil, Michael’s prophecy, Adam and Eve in Eden and their Morning Hymn – often
appropriating Milton’s words. Both Milton and Pope influenced the first African-
American poet, the educated eighteenth-century slave woman Phillis Wheatley.
She often imitated Milton’s syntax, cadences, themes, and verse forms. In Phillis’
Reply she terms Milton the “British Homer” and “Europa’s Bard,” affirming at
once her debt to him, her own insufficiencies in high poetry, and the end of his
epic tradition: “in him Britania’s prophet dies.”
But if Milton’s example was of little use to poets who made him into a literary
icon, reformist and radical statesmen in America, England, and France found much
to their various purposes in both his prose and his poetry. In the buildup to the
Glorious Revolution (1688) English Whigs – John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John
Toland, and Anthony Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury – drew often unacknowl-
edged support from Milton’s attacks on sacerdotal kingship and press censorship,
and from his arguments for Protestant religious toleration and the contract theory
of government in Areopagitica, Tenure, the Defensio, Of Civil Power, and Hirelings. In
1774 the English Republican historian Catherine Macaulay reprised the arguments
of Areopagitica in A Modest Plea for the Property of Copy Right, and her eight-volume
History of England (1763–83) defended the English revolution, the regicide, and the
Commonwealth by marshaling the contract theory arguments of Sidney, Locke,
the Levellers, and Milton’s Tenure and Defensio. Often reprinted in England,
Areopagitica was the first Milton book published in America (1774), and its argu-
ments have continued to echo down the centuries in defense of liberal ideas of
toleration and intellectual freedom. Milton’s other tracts also served revolutionaries
in America, and his poetic imagery and rhetoric was even more important for
them. His agonizing pleas to his countrymen in The Readie and Easie Eay were used
in 1770 to denounce American backsliders; Benjamin Franklin damned British taxa-
tion policy as reminiscent of Milton’s description of Chaos; and John Adams de-