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The History of Literature
729 Milton the Revolutionary (with Orlando Reade) | My Last Book with Jodi Picoult | More Exciting News
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The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello everyone. The History of Literature Podcast is going on tour next spring. I'll be going with a small group of travelers to London, Oxford and Bath where we will visit the land of Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and more. A Trip to Remember if you're interested in learning more about how you can join. You can check out the itinerary@historyofliterature.com or by visiting our partner at John Shores Travel. That's Shores without an E. Or just send me an email@jack wilsonauthormail.com that's J A C K E Wilson wilsonauthormail.com let's give ourselves something to look forward to in 2026. We would love to see you there. Labor Day Savings are happening right now at the Home Depot. So what are you working on? Prep for fall with our wide selection of cordless power tools that make it easy to clear your lawn starting at $. And once the leaves are clear, keep your yard looking fresh with colorful mums.
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That bloom all season long.
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Shop Labor Day Savings now through September 3rd only at the Home Depot. See select stores for details. Hello, you say you want a revolution? Well, you've come to the right place. We've got some exciting new podcast announcements, a look at the revolutionary side of John Milton, and best selling novelist Jodi Picoult discusses her choice for the last book she will ever read. That's all coming up today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. Let's all exhale a bit. Ah, I'm Jack Wilson. Exhaling. You can exhale too. We have made it through August and are in September. It's one month at a time, one day at a time, one hour at a time here at the History of Literature Podcast. And here in Crazy Town USA, aka Washington, D.C. it's depressing how insane everything is, and yet I'm inspired that people are not giving up hope. And that includes us here at the History of Literature Podcast. How could we, when we're given so many excellent examples of writers who lived through their own interesting times? Like the man at the heart of our main topic today, John Milton. Here was a guy who not only lived through a time of great political upheaval, he was engaged in it, writing pamphlets and polemical texts attacking the leader's increasingly autocratic rule and then siding with Oliver Cromwell, working for him at a very high level, putting himself at risk, and in the meantime, writing one of the great long Poems in English. Maybe the great long poem in English, Paradise Lost. Oh, and he was blind. So what are we going to do to address. What are we doing to address our current state? Well, I have my personal politics and all of that, which I'm not going to preach here at the podcast. We'll keep that separate. But I hope you stay engaged too. What I will share with you is that I'm trying to make some positive changes in the way we do business, podcast business and publishing business. Coming up, we want to improve the listener experience for you. And I'll do all this to align with my own personal preferences. So what do we have in store? Well, three major changes to announce. First, I'm excited to announce that we are responding to listeners who have asked for an ad free version of the podcast. Yes, yes, we're going to do that. It's not quite ad free, not 100% ad free, because in some episodes I'm talking about the archives. Now going forward we can mostly be ad free, but in some of the old episodes, the ads are baked right into the content. But you know how if you're a listener, you know how I say let's take a break and then you hear some ads from our sponsors and those, sometimes those sound produced like radio ads, well, we can eliminate those for you people. What we're going to do is offer episodes through our Patreon so you can sign up to be a Patreon and we will deliver, let's call them, low ad versions to you that way. Unfortunately, we can't make them available to listeners on the main feed because we have to pay the bills and we're still using ads to cover our costs. So if you listen through Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you'll hear the ad version. But if you sign up as a Patreon, then we're going to experiment with our low ad version and see if technologically it works. So in case you really, really do not want to hear those ads, look for the announcement that we're rolling out our low ad version on Patreon. Patreon.com Literature I'm glad to be able to do this. I've been wanting to do this for a while. I don't love those ads either. I'll be honest, I'm grateful to the sponsors, always grateful. But I heard something that really made me feel terrible. They said if you're selling ads, your listeners are the product. If you're following the Patreon model, your content is the product. And that made me feel awful. That We've been doing it the first way, not the second. I love my listeners. I consider all of you to be my friends. Is that too much? Anyway, I don't want to think of you guys as a product. These episodes are the product. That's what I'm generating. That's how I'd like to think of it, anyway. And guess what? That leads me right into the second thing, which is that soon we will actually have a new product. And we're going to give that to Patreon members as well. We're launching our new press, HOL Press. I'd say we're three quarters of the way done, four fifths of the way done, far enough along that I don't mind announcing it. And Patreon members who have signed up are going to get the first copy of our very first book that we publish. I will tell you. And they'll get it for free once they've reached a certain amount of giving. I will tell you more about it later when we get further along. But let me just tell you, this is not a book that you can buy just anywhere. There's no other book like it in the world. I know people say that, but this one, I actually, you'll see when you get it. It's innovative. And everyone I say that to says, oh, you're doing something digital or AI. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's an innovation, but it's only going to be available on paper. So once again, our values are coming into play because I want people to get away from screens and I want people to spend time together, and that's what this book is going to do. So on the other hand, we have certain values regarding the environment, so we're going to plant a tree for every unit we ship. And we are not going to sell this on Amazon. I talked to Jeff. He said he's got enough money. I said, okay, that works for me. And what else? At least we're not going to sell it on Amazon for now. And Patreon members who have given $50 over the years, which is a lot of you, you've already generously donated that much, because $5 a month, you know, you do that for a year, you're already there. Or for Patreon members or donors who reach that figure in the future, we'll send you a copy of this new literary adventure for international Patreons. No promises, folks. It might be a little higher than that. We'll try to get you the book. I don't know what exactly is going on now with the mail and all of that and shipping costs, but we'll, we'll, we'll figure something out. And this is a book that I think you'll want to have on your shelf. We're working with a solid independent designer, an independent printer, independent bookstores, independent project manager and proofreader and editors. This is just our small way of being a revolutionary in today's world. A bit of resistance to changes in the world that we don't love. These big companies and mega rich people who have scooped everything up. Well, we're going to have a little corner at the History of Literature podcast and the Hol Press. A company that has the freedom to do things the right way until they come broke. We'll see. Let's hope that doesn't happen. We'll have more about more news about that soon. Or you can sign up now@patreon.com literature to start your way toward the $50 and to eventually get the low ad version of the podcast as soon as we can roll it out. We had a pipe burst here. We've been dealing with some unforeseen circumstances. Looks like this is going to be a busy month. Now, I said there were three exciting announcements, so let's get to the third. We have. Oh, excuse me, somebody at the door bathed in light. I'm Elizabeth Bennet, star of the novel Pride and Prejudice, here to deliver a morsel of news. Mr. Darcy and I are expecting.
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Huzzah to us.
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However, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young couple in possession of an infant must be in want of some sleep. Fortunately, our impoverished neighbour, Mr. Jack Wilson, has offered to babysit our beloved little one so Darcy and I can catch some Z's. Won't you please Support the cause of love, literature and new life. We shall be eternally grateful for your good sense and your good sensibility. Lizzie Bennet, the star expecting. We need to let her catch some zeds, don't we? And the impoverished neighbor is here to help. And Lizzy also wants to tell. Well, she wants us to tell you that we will be visiting the Jane Austen center in Bath along with the Charles Dickens Museum in London, Shakespeare's Globe Theater, and a bunch of stops at literary restaurants and nice hotels and bookstores and libraries and Oxford. And we'll have talks with experts where you get to shake their hands and ask them your questions. And we will all have fun together and get to know one another and have a good time together. Now, sometimes people travel. This is the History of Literature podcast tour and it's taking place in England in May of 2026. Now, sometimes travel, people have different modes of travel. Some people like to see as much as they can. Some people like to take things a little slow. Well, guess what? With this tour, you get to do whatever you want. You get to combine the two, if you. I mean, you get to choose which path you want to take because we have a schedule with events that are built in, but not too many. There's also some rest stops and some afternoons where you can just hang out in your hotel room if you want to take a nap, if that's the way you travel. Or we'll have alternative things to do during those moments. If you're somebody who's on the go and wants to see a little bit more than is on the official itinerary, we've got you covered that way, too.
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So this is.
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Think of yourself as going to Dr. Johnson's house with me. I'm not going to miss that one. And then it's followed by a stop for a pint and a snack at Dr. Johnson's and Dickens's and Agatha Christie's favorite restaurant, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which is still standing, still in operation once again. Once again, people, Values. Values. We chose not to partner up with a big impersonal company. Those billionaires have enough money, in my opinion. But we're working with a small but experienced travel firm, John Shores Travel, that does just this kind of trip. They work with a lot of authors and they're branching out into podcasts. And I think it's going to be a really nice fit. And we're doing that because we want to work with real people at real companies to get that hands on personal touch. I've put together this itinerary with John Shores and a team of two other people. I vetted these guys carefully to make sure they will put together the right itinerary for us and for our listeners and that they have the right approach to making sure that we have a wonderful tour. And I think they've done a great job. I'm confident that we're going to have a great time. And Emma and I. Emma is the show's producer. My beloved Emma, she'll be there, too. We'll both be there to meet all of you and have conversations and meals and generally have the kind of experience that you can only get in person. You can learn more about this trip@historyofliterature.com and at John Shores Travel. That's Shores with no E. And let me tell you the number of guests who are going to be in England and have reached out. The number of podcast guests, people we've had here on the show who we've reached out to, or they've reached out to us and say that they would love to meet up with our small group of travelers. Small group. We're capping it at 15, I think, or 18. It's a manageable size. The number. Well, guess what? You're going to be in a small room like that. The number of authors and scholars and professors who are willing to meet up with us for a meal or a conversation or to help us understand what we're about to see or what we're seeing or just to enjoy the. The camaraderie of people who are traveling and relaxing with literature as the backdrop for everything. I don't think you'll get this experience anywhere else. Hopefully this is a bucket list item for you and hopefully you can check it off after May20, 26. I should tell you, we've had a lot of interest, a lot of inquiries, a lot of people going to the website, and spots are filling up, but there's still room. But guess what? We're only keeping the signups open until the end of September so we can properly plan. So that gives you a few more weeks to check out the itinerary. But if you want to come along with us, you'll need to put down a deposit to secure your place in our merry band of travelers so we know who's coming and we can continue with the planning. Okay. Wow, my head is spinning with all of these announcements and also all the work that we have to do to roll these things out. We've got the new book, we've got the Patreon, we've got the tour. But Emma and I, personal news, we're about to become empty nesters, so we'll have some more time. September is going to be tough, and this pipe bursting doesn't help things any. It's like we're in a battle zone. But our house is. Can you call it a battle zone if you're being attacked by your own house? I guess we live in our enemy's quarters. Anyway, look for things to really take off toward the end of the month. Patreon.com literature and historyofliterature.com or go to John Shore's Travel and look for the entry on the Jack Wilson tour. Okay. Speaking of Dr. Johnson, my literary hero, he had his own take on John Milton. He admired Paradise Lost. But in his Lives of Poets, he talked about Milton's personal life, and he drew an interesting comparison between Milton's poetry and his relationships with others. Now, keep in mind that Dr. Johnson is a devoted institutionalist, a man who loved the monarchy and the church. And that's the one area or two where I disagree with him the most. I'm siding with Milton. Here is my predisposition, even though it's a little weird to take sides in politics from that long ago. But I think if we translated it, updated it for today, I'd probably be on the side of the people who are fighting for the common people. But there's a second paragraph. Just when I think, oh, here we go, Johnson is not on my side, he comes through with a paragraph that makes me admire him all over again. He says things so concisely in such. He's so efficient with his prose and he's so incisive that I just can't quit him. Okay, so here's the paragraph that kind of tilts things in Dr. Johnson's way, and I can kind of see through his slant. So he says, quote, milton's republicanism. And this is republicanism, meaning anti monarchism, I guess. Milton's republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness and a sullen desire of independence, in petulance, impatient of control and pride, disdainful of superiority. He hated monarchs in the state and prelates in the church, for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establishment, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority. End quote. Okay, you can probably hear that, right? Johnson says he has an envious hatred of greatness. He's tipping his hand here. And with phrases like that and sullen desire of independence, we see how Johnson is. Got his finger on the scale here. From Johnson's point of view, rebelling against authority is to be suspected. And he doesn't mind ascribing unflattering motives or personality characteristics or temperamental problems to a person who is looking for freedom. I hear that Milton was against kings and the ruling class. When I hear that, I think, yes, because who made king's moss? That's not an authority I recognize. I don't believe in hereditary rulers. I don't believe in the divine right of kings. I don't see why. I don't see why a king should be in charge. And Johnson says, oh, oh, it sounds like you're envious. Sounds like your hatred of Kings and autocrats is your hatred of greatness. Well, does that follow necessarily? I don't. First of all, who says I hate them? And secondly, who says that it's because I hate greatness? Maybe I want a system of meritocracy which I consider to be greater than heredity. Right? Maybe that's the greatness. Maybe it's a hatred of mediocrity, a hatred of unfounded authority. Well, Johnson says, you want to be independent. And I might say, yes, I do. I have a passionate desire for it. I think that's a good thing. Well, Johnson calls it a sullen desire, as if Milton is sulking, pouting, not getting his way. You can see Johnson, what Johnson says is, you're just. You're just mad that you're not the king. Such loaded terms. And he says you. He says he hates everything whom he was required to obey. And I say, well, yes, because if I'm free, why should I be required to obey the church or a monarch? That's not freedom. And Johnson says, you're a hater. You want to destroy rather than establish. You don't love liberty. You hate authority because you're jealous, because you're just a hater, because you think you're better than your actual betters. Now, at this point, I am firmly, firmly on the side of Milton. And I think maybe Johnson isn't my hero after all. How can he be when he's so opposed to things I love, like actual equality? Not, I'm not in favor of blind obedience. I'm in favor of actual independence, democracy, freedom, suspicion of authority, and especially unearned authority, the stuff of tyrants. Blind obedience to me is not a value to foster, let alone revere. So take A step back, Dr. Johnson. Here comes Jack Wilson. But then Johnson has a paragraph like the next one which wins me over. He says, quote, it has been observed that they who most loudly clamor for liberty do not most liberally grant it. What we know of Milton's character in domestic relations is that he was severe and arbitrary. His family consisted of women, and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females as subordinate and inferior beings, that his own daughters might not break the ranks. He suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought woman made only for obedience and man only for rebellion. End quote. Whoa. Ah, that hits home, doesn't it? Johnson sees this flaw in Milton, as in so many people who loudly call for freedom or liberty, and they themselves are tyrants at home or with. With the people they know freedom for me, but not for thee. And Milton could be fairly accused of this. And Johnson points it out with his usual perspicacity and perspicuity. He's got both. Let's set aside Milton's oppression of his family members and turn to the rebellious side of Milton and how that influenced some other revolutionaries. Orlando Reed will help us make sense of all of that after this episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Hey, folks, if you're like me, you find yourself looking for help in some strange places. Like the woman who cuts my hair. Very nice person. But if you're dealing with serious problems like anxiety, depression, or other clinical issues, you need guidance from a credentialed therapist. 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Over. Roger, Wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today at LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, Joining me now is Orlando Reed, who studied at Cambridge and Princeton, where he received a PhD in English literature and who is now an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University. He also taught in New Jersey prisons for five years. He's here today to discuss his book, what in Me Is the Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost. Orlando Reed, welcome to the history of literature.
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Thanks for having me.
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So let's start where the book does. Malcolm X in Prison has a revelation about who runs the United States. What was that revelation and how does it connect to Milton's Paradise Lost?
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Well, Malcolm X read Paradise Lost when he was in prison in the mid-1940s. And at that time he just converted to the Nation of Islam, the unorthodox sect that really changed his life. And he learned from Elijah Muhammad, the spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam, that it wasn't the case that black people were demonic, as was sort of the insistence of a kind of pernicious, racist myth. But instead, Elijah Muhammad taught that white people were devils on the basis of an interpretation of the Quran, one that Malcolm X would later come to reject. But at this point in his life, in his early life, he accepted this as truth. And when he read Paradise Lost, he was astonished to find that Milton often compared the character of Satan to various worldly figures, including European kings and colonizers. And on the basis of that, I think, correct insight, Malcolm X concluded that Milton and Mr. Elijah Muhammad, as he wrote in his autobiography, were saying the same thing. So the United States was governed by the devil. This was something that Milton had anticipated. And I think that's an extraordinary conclusion. And it's one that, although, as I say, this was a somewhat youthful belief for Malcolm X that he would later come to question and to think more critically about the fact that the government of the United States was spying on black activists and trying to turn them against each other means that in some ways they were acting in a somewhat demonic, deceptive way during this time. So even though it was a somewhat youthful belief, it was to some extent borne out by later revelations.
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I can understand why he thought that and why Milton thought that about some kings and so on. But what doesn't connect for me, it seems a little counterintuitive and is to connect it with the story in Genesis of the Garden of Eden, because the rebel in that story is Satan, and I guess you could say also Eve. They're not exactly the heroes of the story. And so did Milton transform that in Paradise Lost?
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Yeah, that's an important question. Paradise Lost seeks to retell the story of Genesis, but it does so in quite an extraordinary way in that it opens in hell with Satan, where Satan's been cast down after launching a rebellion against God in heaven. And so it gives us a substantial backstory to the temptation of Adam and Eve, beginning with Satan in hell and then following Satan's Odyssey, as Milton describes it, from hell all the way up to the world into the Garden of Eden. And so it gives us a very familiar story but through quite an unfamiliar perspective which for at least the first half of the poem is the perspective of Satan.
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Right. And so Satan being dominant is the way that we're able to see the connection between kind of the demonic rule that we've been talking about.
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That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So Satan's as the hero of the poem, at least the first half of the poem. Satan takes on lots of different sort of guises, lots of different analogies, compare him to lots of different things. And at least some of those things are European colonists and the king of Spain and so on. And what I realized and what I write about in my book was that Malcolm X was actually making quite a sophisticated insight into the connection between the story of Genesis as told specifically by Milton and the nation of Islam. Origin myth, which is I think somewhat well known today tells the story of a black scientist called Yakub who was the inventor of the white race. A kind of Frankenstein esque story but in some of its tellings it sounds a lot like Paradise Lost. Yaqub is cast out of the holy city of Mecca and he is sent to this distant far flung island, the island of Patmos, where he and his race of white devils sort of establish their home. And I realize that actually that sounds quite a lot like Satan in hell in Milton's poem. And on that basis Malcolm X was saying something quite interesting that had been overlooked by other scholars but apparently it.
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Had not been overlooked by other revolutionaries. So is this what we've been talking about? Is that kind of. Did Malcolm X put his finger on something that other revolutionaries had also noticed about the poem?
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That's a really good question. I think the most famous reading of the poem runs counter to Malcolm X's interpretation. And that is the famous claim made by the poet William Blake in the late 18th century who wrote that Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it, that is that he unconsciously sympathizes with Satan. He gives Satan some of the best lines which he really, he really does do because Milton himself was a revolutionary and he couldn't, just couldn't help investing this revolutionary figure with a kind of sublime grandeur. So that's Blake's radical reading of the poem. But Malcolm X, what I found interesting was that Malcolm X read the poem straight. He saw it as a revolutionary text but he didn't need to read it against the grain. He could simply read it as I think Milton intended in a less ingenious, less paradoxical way than William Blake. Still find it to be a radically galvanizing text.
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Okay, well, then let's talk about Milton and let's back up a little bit and ask where Milton was when he wrote Paradise Lost. Where was he in terms of his political struggle? And how did his own attitude toward revolution affect the way he approached the Adam and Eve story?
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Well, Milton first came up with the idea for an epic poem on the subject of Adam and Eve around 1640, when he was still a young man, around 30 years old. And he seems to have known that it would be the great accomplishment of his life. And he set it aside. He set it aside because the English Civil War broke out, broke out in 1642, and Milton devoted the next 20 years to political writing and other kinds of political work. He started writing radical pamphlets during the Civil War years, which championed political freedoms in various ways. He supported Parliament and opposed the king. And so after the English king, King Charles I, was beheaded in 1649, and a new government was established, a republic was established. Milton was given a job in the republic. He had the job title the Secretary of Foreign tongues. And this involved writing and translating diplomatic correspondence. So for the next 10 years, he devoted a lot of his time to work as a kind of civil servant, fairly close to the corridors of executive power in England. And it was only after the failure of that experiment in 1660, the English monarchy was restored, that Milton really, it seems, had time to return to Paradise Lost. So he writes Paradise Lost in the wake of this political defeat, the defeat of the cause to which he had devoted much of his adult life. And Paradise Lost to some extent, is a reflection of that. There's an ongoing debate among scholars and critics about how political Paradise Lost is. I think it's fair to say that Milton was writing a great work of literature and not writing a political pamphlet. So he wasn't trying to get his own back on his enemies. And yet Paradise Lost is infused with images and, to some extent, arguments and logics that are familiar from the English Civil War. This revolutionary moment, however, some of those arguments are put into the mouth of Satan.
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So your title picks up on a line and a concept, I guess, that would take us into some deep waters. What does Milton mean by what in me is dark? Illumine?
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Hopefully not deep waters in the sense that I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I think the poem's aesthetic darkness is one of the most famous aspects of it, and one of the most, I think, rightly admired parts of it. Milton describes Satan in hell as surrounded by a kind of darkness visible. And he's very interested in paradoxical images of visibility. Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, and he described his world as having gone dark. He was also twice widowed and had lost his firstborn son, so he'd in recent years experienced deep loss in addition to the political defeat. So the darkness of Paradise Lost is a multivalent one. But the meaning of the title of my book what in Me Is Dark was for me came to mean the thing in the poem that makes it so rich, richly ambiguous, richly suggestive, that makes it excellent poetry. This darkness is its capacity to generate lots of different interpretations, some of them contradictory, some of them prophetic. Prophecy is sometimes described as dark words. So the specific sense that I was focusing on was the sense that what made Paradise Lost poetic was the same thing that made it so extraordinarily flexible and liable to be read and sometimes misread by later readers.
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So in that reading, instead of what in Me is Dark, we might say, what in me is difficult to understand or difficult to reconcile or seemingly self contradictory.
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Yeah, what in me is obscure. What in me is unknown, even to myself. I think in that sense, Milton was doing what many other poets do, but doing it on a grander scale, on a more fulfilled kind of epic level, but absolutely difficult. It is a difficult poem, but it's not only difficult, it's extraordinarily vivid. And I think that's what helps readers to connect with it.
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The reading of what in Me Is Dark, spoken by someone who has lost his sight, is certainly kind of a compelling one on a biographical sense. But I do wonder if these other readings kind of give us more universality and a stronger tie to it. I mean, the way I'm reading it is that we all have a kind of darkness in us, or we all have a. That we share this. And Milton is being brave by saying, that's where I'm going to go.
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I think that's absolutely right. And I should make this clear, because I suggested otherwise, that Milton didn't see his blindness as a disability. He insists in Paradise Lost that becoming blind had actually permitted him to gain a different sight that would allow him to write this poem to access a kind of divine truth that if he had not been blind, would have been more difficult to access. And I'm convinced that that's not just rhetoric. And he really was talking about a kind of darkness, as you Say is a darkness that exists within all of us. Not just sin or something that is private, but something that's something that's widely shared. I do think that's an important thing.
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To note in thinking about the revolutionaries that we touched upon with Malcolm X and that we'll be talking more about later. Do you think it could be a revolutionary spirit saying, why am I so angry or willing to revolt, or what is it about my circumstances that needs to change?
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I do think that by giving us the figure of Satan at the opening of his poem, Milton was intentionally misleading his readers, inviting them to see Satan as a kind of archetypal revolutionary. By the end of the poem, Satan looks a lot like a kind of dictator or even a king. And the reader has come to see the struggle for liberty as not being a demonic thing, but something that might happen between human beings like Adam and Eve through acts of rational debate, through humility, forgiveness and love. So in a way, there's a kind of epic bait and switch where we're offered one image, revolution that seems demonic and impressive, sublime, angry, vengeful. But by the end we've come to see revolution as something that is far more humble and loving and humane. And I think that's not often enough stressed. And it's partly primacy bias, but readers have been far more inclined to think about the opening of the poem with Satan than to understand what happens at the end.
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Is primacy bias a nice way of saying a lot of readers don't finish the work?
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Yes, I think that might be true.
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A
Right, so was this something that was completely invented by Milton? Was his. I mean, were there any sermons or theologians that he was drawing upon? Was there a tradition of viewing the Adam and Eve story in this way? Or is this something he basically read the Bible and then came up with his own approach?
- [43:16]
B
One of the difficult things about studying Milton is to grasp the extent to which he was both original and extraordinarily learned at the same time. And the best reason to use a really good edition of the poem when you're reading it is that you can glimpse into. It's almost a kind of vertigo inducing experience. The footnotes of an edition, like the John Carey edition will just show you how deep Milton's connections were with his sources. And so, yes, it was the Bible, but it was also a long theological tradition. He was in his interpretations and even in some of his inventions, was drawing on, departing from and sometimes recapitulating things that had been speculated about before. So it's important to stress that even as I think what he came up with. The whole mosaic of ideas and inventions in Paradise Lost is an extraordinarily original grand picture.
- [44:34]
A
Right? Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Orlando Read Introducing the perfect companion to your morning listening routine. AG1's clinically backed formula is now flavor packed with three new delicious tropical berry and citrus. Start the day on a high note with probiotics that taste like the tropics. Mix it up with micronutrients that taste like berry or citrus, and take it all the way back with the classic AG1 original with notes of pineapple and vanilla. Do your health a flavor or four with AG1 next gen, the Daily Health Drink. Learn more at drink ag1.com Gatorade is.
- [45:21]
B
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- [45:24]
A
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- [45:27]
B
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- [45:27]
A
Can lose more sweat and raise your game. Gatorade is it in you? Okay, we're back. So Orlando, let's turn to your book and we talked already about Malcolm X. What other thinkers do you focus on? Who who came after Milton and how did they adapt Paradise Lost for their own revolutionary purposes?
- [46:06]
B
Well, the book starts by talking about Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, because they were the, as the founding fathers of America, the leading exponents of the next major revolution after Milton's own revolution. And they were all passionate readers of Paradise Lost. So I start by talking about their fairly straightforward relationship with Milton. They saw him as the great poet of the English language alongside Shakespeare. They saw him as someone who had tried to carry out a republican revolution in England similar to the one they wanted to carry out in America. But they also, in perhaps a characteristically American way, wanted to go one step further, wanted to improve on what he had imagined. And of course his revolution had failed and their revolution would succeed. And so there was also an edge of competitiveness there. So that's where the book starts. And the next chapters look at readers in the French and Haitian revolutions respectively. It considers some literary writers like George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, who were, I argue, using Milton in order to imagine progress in women's rights and in other related legal reforms and changes in the relationship between men and women. And then in the 20th century, I look at quite a strange array of different political characters, including Hannah Arendt In 1950s America, Cold War America, CLR James, the Trinidadian historian and socialist agitator Malcolm X, and then the Canadian right wing psychologist Jordan Peterson. So it's quite an eclectic group, but hopefully an interesting one.
- [48:16]
A
So I'm looking for threads that can connect these various groups and these political and also cultural revolutions. I mean, is it overly simplistic to say that in some sense they're all searching for freedom?
- [48:32]
B
Freedom is the key term in Paradise Lost. Milton insists that Adam and Eve have free will and that it was not a mistake for God to give them free will, free will to obey or disobey him. And I think you're right to say that that is the most common term for. For readers of the poem. It's also the central term of Western, of the Western political tradition. So in that sense, Paradise Lost was a fitting choice for political readers. Freedom is also, I think, a notoriously tricky idea to pin down, to fix with kind of universal definitions. So freedom is also something that can be read back into Paradise Lost in ways that Milton didn't intend. And that perhaps helps to account for the extraordinary diversity of readings that people come up with. Milton wanted the reader to be free, but in order for that to be the case, he had to allow for the possibility that the poem would be misread.
- [49:52]
A
So he was, in a sense, putting himself in the shoes of God, saying, I could be didactic and force an interpretation on readers, but instead I want them to come to that of their own free will. And I have to accept that not everyone is going to be able to, or that everyone will want to, or who just will get to the same point that I might be hoping they get to.
- [50:23]
B
I think that's right. In the poem, there is a kind of fundamental contradiction between that freedom, which you've just described very well, and a wish to tell people how to live. That contradiction also characterizes Milton's own life and some of his political views and personal relationships. Perhaps he's not that unique in struggling to contradict these things, but Paradise Lost is certainly unique in posing that question on an explicit level, but also dramatizing it on an experiential level. To read this poem is to be forced to confront your own freedom and to figure out what to do with it.
- [51:11]
A
Right? What kind of freedom are we talking about? I mean, it's one thing to say freedom and we all, everybody's in favor of it, but there's also a question of, well, what do you mean by it? What do you want to do with that freedom? What are you hoping to accomplish? I mean, a dictator might say that they are only seeking freedom. They want to be free from all laws and all restrictions. But who are the people in Paradise Lost who are searching for freedom and freedom from what or from whom?
- [51:47]
B
Yes, you're absolutely right. And Milton would be the first to say that discourses of freedom are easily abused. In one of his early earlier poems, a sonnet, he distinguishes between liberty and license. For him, license means something like licentiousness, sexual debauchery. Essentially. Milton believed that it was important for English people to have the freedom to worship in various different ways and the freedom to interpret the Bible for themselves. But he was also aware that that freedom could be abused and that one could read the Bible in such a way as to allow oneself all sorts of sinful excesses. And so he wanted to caution us that just because we have freedom, it doesn't mean that we should use it however we want. We should have freedom because, as he argues in Paradise Lust, love is something that can't be compelled, that has to be given freely. So the love of your husband or wife is something that shouldn't be compelled by law. And that's why he argued for divorce. And the love of one's political leader shouldn't be compelled. It should be given by consent. It should. Government by consent, by election, rather than through hereditary rules. So Milton really did insist that freedom was necessary, but that's not because it wasn't liable to abuse. He was conscious of that. And in Paradise Lost he shows us how we can abuse our own freedom. We can abuse our own freedom in Paradise Lost by loving Satan and not reading beyond book two. But we lose out. And his argument for why is that he believed that when we choose to obey God, when we choose to obey the principle of love and goodness and justice and so on, that's not a compulsory choice, and that's not a submissive one. That's the best realization of our freedom. At least that's what he believes. So a kind of knee jerk rebellious reaction might seem like the most free thing I can do, but is in fact not the best expression of my freedom.
- [54:26]
A
Right. It seems like that would be a good lesson for revolutionaries. It might inspire them to seek their freedom and to, you know, overturn the. Whichever power is restricting their freedom. But also a good lesson to remind them it doesn't just stop there. You will have choices to make if you do accomplish that freedom, and you can make good choices that will lead down better paths or it can spiral out of control.
- [55:01]
B
I think that's exactly right. And, and one of the places that I see this argument happening today is among prison abolitionists and some of the, I think, leading thinkers among the American prison abolitionist movement, like Ruth Wilson Gilmour insists that Abolition should be understood as building up society's capacity to care and so on, rather than simply destroying. And I think that's a really important message that Milton would have agreed with.
- [55:33]
A
Right. Are there any particular passages in Paradise Lost that are often cited by the revolutionaries that you've studied?
- [55:45]
B
Well, as we've already mentioned, people are drawn over and over again to Satan. They make a vast array of different meanings out of Satan's character, his words. But he is really the most magnetic character in the whole poem. And his speeches in book one of Paradise Lost, including famous lines like, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, just resound across the centuries. And I was unsurprised to read. When I was reading Hunter S. Thompson's book about the Hell's Angels, the Motorbike Gang, it was unsurprising to find him quoting that line from Satan in that book. It became a kind of slogan for the counterculture in the 20th century, but also decades before that. One could even see William Blake's claim about Milton about siding with Satan as the origin of a certain kind of counterculture in the late 18th century that would culminate in the Hell's Angels and that kind of glorious demonic countercultural moment in the 1960s.
- [57:08]
A
Right. So do you think that Milton, we have such striking examples here of Blake and Hunter S. Thompson siding with Satan? And we have Malcolm X, who's viewing, you know, his takeaway from it is. Well, actually, the authority figure that I'm faced with is actually Satan. Do you think Milton intended one way or the other? Do you think he would, you know, if he were looking down on these groups, he would say, you guys got it right and you guys got it wrong.
- [57:42]
B
Well, I do have a strong opinion about this, and my feeling is that William Blake's interpretation, whilst it is ingenious, whilst it does help us to account for the charisma of Satan's character, doesn't help us to read or enjoy the second half of the poem. In William Blake's view, the second part of the poem is unsuccessful, lacking in interest. And for me, some of the most extraordinary moments come when the poem's focus shifts from Satan to Adam and Eve, which happens in book four and five of paradise, of the 12 books. And so the poem becomes progressively more and more interested in Adam and Eve and less and less interested in Satan. So I think that that's the major downside of Blake's view. And my feeling is that there is this extraordinary. Well, what I called the bait and switch. There is this extraordinary shift where Milton encourages us to pay attention to different things towards the end than he seemed to be inviting us to at the beginning. So in that sense, my reading of Paradise Lost is a somewhat more conservative one. I think Milton didn't intend for Satan to be the hero. I don't think that his character of God is unsympathetic ultimately, as some people, including William Blake, have suggested. But what I'm insisting in my book is that you don't have to misread Paradise Lost in order to find it to be a revolutionary text.
- [59:26]
A
Right. Did you ever teach this when you were teaching in those prisons in New Jersey? And if so, what was the. What was the response of the prisoners?
- [59:40]
B
I never got to teach the whole poem, which is something that I did always want to do. But I describe in the introduction of my book a moment where I taught the opening of Paradise Lost in prison. And one of the students said something very interesting about it. Pointed out that the Milton's treatment of meter, poetic rhythm invited the reader to read disobediently. And that single remark unlocked something in the poem for me. I guess I came to see the way that the poem was read as having some relationship to the atmosphere in which it was read. So I don't know exactly what was going on in that student's life. But it didn't seem like an accident that someone who was at that time in a state prison was thinking about disobedience and was particularly attentive to the notion of disobedience that Milton was talking about. And that, I think, helped to inspire the book more generally in my interest in the relationship between the moral and political atmosphere that the reader is living in and the way that they're interpreting the poem. I would love to teach this poem in prison another time if I ever get the opportunity. But in lieu of that, I hope that it might be read by people who are in prison. Because the final chapter talks of the five years I spent teaching in prisons and talks about how intellectually rich those classroom discussions were. I hope that it manages to communicate a kind of intellectual respect for those readers, those students who I got to teach. And in doing so, to honor the kind of intellectual exchange that can happen in those environments.
- [61:49]
A
It seems like it would. I mean, everything we've talked about in terms of the search for freedom, but also the potentially overwhelming sense of possibilities once you acquire the freedom, could be something for people who are imprisoned to really have to wrestle with. What is life going to be like once I'm no longer in this regimented? System where the rules are all prescribed for me and I'm. I'm supposed to follow them. What is it like once I get out there and the meter can be whatever I choose it to be?
- [62:24]
B
I think that's a really interesting suggestion. And I think you're absolutely right that those are questions that incarcerated people are wrestling with and the challenges that they face on being released are really substantial. You're right. That's a particularly intense version of the free will and the challenges all human beings face, especially keenly felt, I would imagine, by them.
- [62:56]
A
Well, the book is called what in Me is the Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost. Orlando Reid, thank you so much for joining me on the History of literature.
- [63:06]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [63:12]
A
And finally today we hear from Jodi Picoult. When she was on the podcast, we discussed her novel By Any Other Name, which revolves around the theory of the works of Shakespeare being authored by Amelia Lanier or Bassano. Amelia Bassano, also known as which that theory Jody developed when she was on a trip in England. I believe maybe if you join the History of Literature podcast tour, you'll have some new ideas of your own. We are certainly going to have a lot of Shakespeare involved.
- [63:42]
B
Excuse me.
- [63:42]
A
As part of our trip. And who knows where these things wind up. So anyway, after Jodi and I discussed the ideas in her novel, I asked her a special question. Okay. We're here with best selling novelist and the author of By Any Other Name, Jodi Picoult. Jody, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [64:23]
B
So I thought a lot about this and I imagine that like half the.
- [64:27]
A
World would say, you know, the.
- [64:29]
B
The final Game of Thrones book by George R.R.
- [64:32]
A
Martin.
- [64:35]
B
But given what I've been writing about.
- [64:37]
A
In By Any Other Name, and given.
- [64:40]
B
The firm belief I have that Emilio.
- [64:43]
A
Bassano somehow played a part in the authorship of the Shakespearean plays, I would.
- [64:50]
B
Kill to find some hidden document that proves that.
- [64:55]
A
Yeah, right. Diary, she wrote. Yeah, yeah. Even if it wasn't a diary, even if it was something in her hand.
- [65:02]
B
That could be proved that has her.
- [65:04]
A
Writing in a foul copy of a.
- [65:07]
B
Script or something, you know, which we.
- [65:09]
A
Don'T really have for Shakespeare.
- [65:10]
B
We only have his notes in the comments on someone else's script.
- [65:14]
A
So I would love to see that.
- [65:15]
B
Because then I could die and my last words would be I told you so.
- [65:22]
A
The best Last words of all. Now we think of this as being such well traveled ground and that everything is known and everything that will be known is known and all of that. But when we were talking about your book, you told the story of a discovery you made by looking at some portraits in a museum. And so it occurs to me that this could be discovered. It's possible that we're going to learn more. And it almost seems inevitable that we're going to learn more about some aspect of this.
- [65:55]
B
So this is a fun fact. So, you know, when it comes to this era, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
- [66:02]
A
And there are a lot of the.
- [66:04]
B
Fact that women, it's been expected or said that women weren't writing during the Elizabethan era. And we're starting to see that is not true. There are academics who are studying these letters that women would write to their unborn children thinking they were going to die because many women died in childbirth. And so they wanted to be able to impart wisdom to their surviving child if they were not there. And the reason we don't have them is because if you did survive, that was really bad luck and you would burn it or get rid of it.
- [66:34]
A
But there are academics now who are.
- [66:36]
B
Starting to find and read those letters and try to sort of weave together what the writing of women looked like at the time.
- [66:45]
A
And that tells me here we are.
- [66:48]
B
More than 400 years later, just discovering the writings of women. There is absolutely still a chance that there's more out there.
- [66:58]
A
We will look forward to that. Jodi Picoult, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [67:04]
B
Thank you for having me. This has been great.
- [67:11]
A
Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Jodi Pico and Orlando Reed for joining me today. And Dr. Johnson. I can't wait to see your house again. Good doctor. And all of the other sites of London as well. And I can't wait to see you, dear listeners, as part of the tour. So please do head over to John Shore's Travel and check out the itinerary and put down your deposit so you can be part of the fun. And more information will be coming soon about our new press, HOL Press, with its book launch. Yikes. Little fills me with trepidation. It's going to be a few weeks, it looks like. As I said, we're dealing with a bunch of stuff here, unfortunately. But anyway, we'll try to roll out our changes and benefits for our Patreon members soon too. Oh, it's coming to be a good month, people. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.
- [68:29]
B
Sa.