Delirious Milton

Written after the collapse of his political hopes, Milton's late works paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes wrestle with what it means to be a poet on the threshold of a secular world, in the shadow of divine Creation, but committed to an emerging, spiritualized view of human creativity. It is the fate of the artist in modernity to be increasing to be increasingly drawn into shamanism, the very opposite of what Walter Benjamin meant by loss of the aura. Book jacket.

Gordon Teskey is Professor of English at Harvard University, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost, and author of Allegory and Violence.