EpilogueThe second generation of Romantic poets were also aided in realizing their
poetic visions through engagement with Milton. Byron’s notorious “Byronic” he-
roes – Manfred, Cain – are descendants of Milton’s Satan in their dark passions,
enormous nameless guilt, total alienation, and titanic self-assertion. A defiant critic
of all sorts of orthodoxy who died fighting to liberate Greece, Byron praised Milton’s
intellectual courage in facing down tyrants, and in Don Juan wished him back “to
freeze once more / The blood of monarchs with his prophecies” and to convict
time-serving poets of the present. Strongly influenced by Byron, the revolutionary
Russian poet Pushkin also looked to Milton as an embodiment of genius, integrity,
and amazing courage. Shelley honored Milton as a republican and a bold inquirer
into morals and religion who made his Satan far superior to his God in moral virtue,
giving him the best arguments and a character of unsurpassed energy and magnifi-
cence. Milton’s impress on Shelley’s poetry is everywhere: in Milton’s Spirit he
imagines that Milton might again sound his “Uranian lute” to make “sanguine
thrones and impious altars” quake; his elegy for Keats, Adonais, invites comparison
with Lycidas; and Prometheus Unbound, a poem in four books about the regaining of
Paradise, owes large debts to Paradise Regained and Jesus’ evolving definition of the
kingdom within. Keats also admired Milton’s zealous liberalism, waxed enthusiastic
about several passages of sublimity, beauty, and pathos in Paradise Lost, and re-
sponded to seeing a lock of Milton’s hair with a poem promising to follow his
example and rise to nobler philosophic harmonies. His epic fragment Hyperion por-
trays the fall of Saturn and the Titans sympathetically, but treats the rise of the new
gods and especially Apollo, god of the sun and of high poetry, as necessary for
progress. Miltonic elements range from the sinuous blank verse, to the debate of
the baffled Titans, to many particulars of image and idiom, but Keats came to
believe the Miltonic mode to be antithetical to his own genius, and began the
poem over again in other terms. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, written at a
period when Shelley was reading Paradise Lost aloud in the evenings, is a strikingly
original re-creation of Milton’s central myth; its epigraph from Paradise Lost – “Did
I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From
darkness to promote me” – invites association of Dr Frankenstein with Milton’s
God, the creature with Adam, and both with aspects of Satan.
Romantic critics commented at length and often astutely about Milton’s poetry,
and, like the poets, found his Satan powerfully attractive. Coleridge honored Milton’s
republicanism and role in the English revolution, characterized him as a “sublimer
poet than Homer or Virgil,” and ranked him with Shakespeare. He admired the
Miltonic Satan’s “dark and savage grandeur,” but also observed that he displayed
the egotism characteristic of “liberticides” from Nimrod to Bonaparte.^2 Hazlitt de-
scribed Milton’s Satan as the most heroic epic subject ever chosen for a poem, and
praised Milton for portraying his nature and his rhetoric without any recourse to
cheap deformities, while also showing him to embody love of power, pride, self-
will, and ambition. And when Walter Savage Landor and the poet laureate Robert