While Shakespeare seems to maintain the status of perennial contemporary, Milton does not enjoy quite the same standing. The knotty theological wrangling and offensively strict gender hierarchies of Paradise Lost, not to mention the obtrusive and rebarbative personality of its author, make it an ever-harder sell. Is Milton’s 10,565-line poem in blank verse about the fall of Adam and Eve anything more than, as one 20th-century critic memorably put it, ‘a monument to dead ideas’? 

This year sees the 350th anniversary of Milton’s death – he died from complications of gout, according to his early biographers, on the night of 9–10 November 1674 – and Orlando Reade has marked the occasion by making a spirited attempt to claim Paradise Lost as part of the fabric of modernity. The poem has been used by readers from Thomas Jefferson to Jordan Peterson ‘to understand the best and worst parts of their world’. It has become fashionable to publish ‘biographies’ of literary works. What in Me is Dark, Reade’s first book – which emerged out of his experiences as a doctoral student at Princeton and, more intriguingly, as a teacher in a New Jersey prison – is a study of the poem’s afterlife.

What in Me is Dark consists of twelve chapters, a homage to the twelve books into which Milton, shortly before his death, reorganised Paradise Lost (it originally consisted of ten). Milton devised the new structure to honour Virgil’s Aeneid. Reade offers impressionistic portraits of each of these twelve books, together with more detailed descriptions of how the poem has been received and used. In this task he moves chronologically, from the American War of Independence to the American culture wars of recent years, while ranging widely around the world. He pays particular attention to the irony of how a poem which was disseminated globally through the cultural and educational structures of the British Empire was imprinted on the minds of those who revolted against colonial forms of authority.

The story of how Paradise Lost was read by Blake, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and T S Eliot, all of whom feature extensively in Reade’s narrative, has been told often enough. While Reade’s passages on these writers are a useful reminder that the history of English literary criticism between the 18th and the 20th centuries is in no small part the history of the reception of Milton, what is fresh and arresting in his book is the attention given to marginalised figures, such as the Haitian revolutionary Baron de Vastey, the radical abolitionist James Redpath, the Trinidadian intellectual C L R James and the African-American revolutionary Malcolm X. In its focus on the place of Paradise Lost in the minds of those who have campaigned for racial and gender equality in the modern world, What in Me is Dark is recognisably a product of the cultural climate of post-2016 America. 

Crucial to Reade’s exploration of the ‘revolutionary life’ of Paradise Lost is Milton’s own career as a revolutionary writer, of which Reade gives a summary in his introduction. Milton’s prose work The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was the most radical defence of the execution of Charles I as a tyrant in 1649 and encouraged the new republican government to hire him as, in effect, its chief propagandist – a role he continued to perform into Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate (despite having gone completely blind by 1652). This is where much of the fascination of Milton’s life lies. No great poet in English has been closer to the mechanisms of power and representation than Milton. We owe the existence of Paradise Lost to the surprising decision of the monarchical regime that was restored in 1660 to let Milton go free while it was rounding up and executing others associated with the regicide. 

Milton’s fame as a poet helped his ideas about tyranny and freedom circulate and to accumulate cultural authority in revolutionary America and France. Much of this is well documented, but Reade is especially concerned with the blind spots of race and gender in the standard explanations of Milton’s poetic and political influence. Hence he wonders how Thomas Jefferson reconciled the interest in liberty and equality evident in the extracts from Milton that he copied into his commonplace book with his life as a slave owner. Reade rightly finds tensions between liberty and constraint, between revolt and tyranny embedded in the astonishing poetry of Paradise Lost itself. Where some have suggested that Jefferson saw himself in Milton’s Satan proclaiming liberty against the tyranny of Heaven, Reade asks whether ‘Satan – a revolutionary who turns out to be a tyrant – might have made Jefferson think of the contradiction between his public character and his private conscience. Milton’s hypocritical Satan may have been a mirror.’ 

As the title suggests, What in Me is Dark mixes psychological speculation of this kind with analysis of the poem’s reception, for which documentary evidence is fragmentary and inconsistent. Some of Reade’s speculations are more convincing than others – the chapter on Hannah Arendt and her relationship with Heidegger strains to make the connection with Milton – but the weight of allusion and reference built up over the course of the book is compelling.

One of the most successful aspects of What in Me is Dark is Reade’s account of how his fascination with the tension between obedience and disobedience in Paradise Lost was fostered by the classes that he volunteered to teach to state prisoners during his time at Princeton. One prisoner’s perceptive observation about the ‘disobedient’ metre of Milton’s blank verse is revealed at the beginning of the book, but we must wait until the final chapter for a full account of what Reade evidently found to be both a disconcerting and a transformative personal experience. 

It is probably just as well that Reade decided to leave the description of his time teaching Milton to prisoners until the end. Otherwise, the book would conclude with the claim that the media commentator Jordan Peterson is (Milton scholars, cover your ears) ‘the most famous living interpreter of Paradise Lost’. Peterson has apparently used the character of Milton’s Satan to analyse the psychology of contemporary society. This is, says Reade, the latest illustration of how ‘Paradise Lost has often resurfaced in moments of political polarisation’. 

What in Me is Dark is a lucid and sometimes moving reminder of how Milton’s epic, for all its pre-modern erudition and doctrinal complexity, has continually been given new life by its modern readers.