WHAT IN ME IS DARK

A powerful poem endures.

British literary scholar Reade makes his book debut with a fresh consideration of the long and surprising afterlife of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, published in 1667, by revealing the poem’s effect on readers over time, from colonial America to Wordsworth’s Lake District, from Bloomsbury to a New Jersey prison. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Milton’s political ideas infused the North American colonies and informed the language of the Declaration of Independence. “With the outbreak of war between Britain and the thirteen colonies, in April 1775,” Reade notes, “references to Milton began to sprout like mushrooms after rainfall.” Jefferson saw Milton as a radical republican who made the need for throwing off tyranny self-evident. For William Wordsworth, witnessing revolution in France, Milton aroused a fascination with lone revolutionaries, as he did for rebels later in Haiti and Cuba. “In the years leading up to the Arab Spring,” Reade reveals, “readers across the Middle East saw in Milton’s poetry messages about freedom and totalitarianism.” For George Eliot—who admitted to having a crush on the poet—his life and work were inspiration for Middlemarch, “a horror story about marriage.” Milton inspired, too, the 19th-century New Orleans carnival society Mistick Krewe of Comus. Among many other readers Reade considers are abolitionist James Redpath; Virginia Woolf, who mused over the poem in her diary; Hannah Arendt; Malcolm X, who saw in the poem “a radical critique of Western rulers”; and Reade’s students in a poetry class he taught at Northern State Prison. Reade helpfully provides historical context and enlightening explications of the poem that, he persuasively asserts, conveys a crucial message: “that the fundamental human condition is one of freedom.”

Edifying, wide-ranging cultural criticism.