John Milton's Republican Poetics and the Politics of Paradise Lost
Date
2023-03-07
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
ORCID
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Doctoral
Abstract
Abstract
England in the 1640s was torn by civil war between Parliamentarians in pursuit of a free commonwealth and Royalists loyal to the Stuart monarchy of Charles I. Throughout the decade, John Milton turned from poetry to political pamphleteering, attaching his personal calling to the republican cause. During the 1640s, his polemical tracts argued for freedom of expression and liberty from monarchical oppression. In the treatise The Reason of Church Government Urged Against the Prelaty, Milton presented his political writing as preparation for the great national poem he would someday write. After the execution of Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy in 1649, Milton defended regicide and republicanism in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Eikonoklastes, and the two Latin Defenses. However, by the end of the 1650s, the political hopefulness expressed in tracts such as Defensio Secunda was replaced by the poet’s disillusionment over the impending restoration of the monarchy. In 1660 Milton wrote The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, where he criticized his countrymen’s inability to sustain republican rule and pleaded that they acknowledge that reason and law were integral to the construction of the English commonwealth.
My thesis argues that the interplay of reason, law, and human will is also central to Milton’s post-Restoration epic, Paradise Lost. Nevertheless, many critics see the epic as the poet’s retreat from politics. My research demonstrates that Paradise Lost is not a work that signals Milton’s withdrawal from active political engagement; rather, the poem reflects the poet’s continued commitment to evaluating the country’s political challenges and addresses twenty years of republican potential, upheaval, tyranny, and disintegration. My dissertation provides a systematic analysis of specific episodes in Paradise Lost and takes into consideration their relationship with the political and theological views of Milton expressed in his polemical tracts during the civil war, Interregnum, and Restoration. I argue that the political debates in Heaven and Pandemonium, the exchanges between Adam and Eve in the Garden, and Adam’s visions and Michael’s instruction reflect Milton’s commitment to a free commonwealth over monarchical tyranny, his disillusionment with his contemporaries, and his belief in the educability of the English people.
Description
Keywords
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Politics, Republicanism
Citation
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
English
Program
English