Epilogueembodying, Melville thinks, Milton’s own profound questioning of theodicy: “Provi-
dence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, / Fixt Fate, Free Will, Foreknowledge
absolute.”^11 And Walt Whitman took on the mantle of the poet–seer from Milton
and Wordsworth as he sang a new, democratic epic celebrating himself as the em-
bodiment of everything in the universe.
In the earlier twentieth century, and especially in England, Milton the poet was
seen as an icon of the cultural and literary establishment, to be embraced as such or
vigorously rejected, whereas Milton the man was repudiated as a dour Puritan,
republican, and regicide. C. S. Lewis praised Paradise Lost as a brilliantly realized
epic of orthodox Christianity, while William Empson carried on his battle against
the God of that same orthodox Christianity who disfigured, as he thought, the text
of Milton’s epic. T. S. Eliot admitted his antipathy toward Milton the man, arising,
as he shrewdly recognized, from the fact that the Civil War has never really ended
in England. In several essays beginning in 1922 Eliot launched the modernist attack
on Milton’s poetry, warning his poet–contemporaries against imitating the poet
who had helped produce a “dissociation of sensibility” in English poetry and whose
convoluted poetic language violates English norms. He recanted some of this in
1947, acknowledging that Milton had invented a great though inimitable poetic
language marked by musicality, long periods, and imagery evoking vast size and
limitless space, and that modern poets might learn from him about freedom within
form. While American New Critics were echoing Eliot’s disparagement of Milton’s
poetry, American scholars were producing painstaking editions of his entire oeuvre;
in the crisis years before and during World War II, that oeuvre was often held forth
as an embodiment of Christian humanism and American liberal values of toleration,
individualism, and personal freedom. Virginia Woolf’s reference to “Milton’s bo-
gey” – his ideas of woman’s inferiority as a major obstacle to women writers’ crea-
tivity – in the final chapter of A Room of One’s Own (1929) shaped the response to
Milton of many twentieth-century feminist readers. A similar notion of Milton’s
repressive effect on women informs Robert Graves’s novel imagining Milton’s do-
mestic life, The Story of Mary Powell, Wife to Mr Milton (1943). Some contemporary
feminists, however, have been led by Milton, as Catherine Macaulay, Margaret
Fuller, and George Eliot had been, to write themselves into his programs of reform
and intellectual liberty. In that appropriative spirit Malcolm X enlisted Milton for
black liberation, identifying his Satan with the popes and kings and other evil forces
of Europe, and so concluding that “Milton and Mr. Elijah Muhammad were actu-
ally saying the same thing.”^12
Milton’s impress on twentieth-century literary texts is often a matter of allusions
that evoke his works to supply context or ironic contrast. A few examples must
suffice. Eliot’s Four Quartets contain allusions that incorporate Milton among the
many voices commenting on memory and history; Eliot’s verse dramas, especially
Murder in the Cathedral, owe a good deal to Samson Agonistes; and Eliot played off
Milton’s title for his Sweeney Agonistes. James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses looks to