William Blake and the Endurance of Satan as Hero in “Paradise Lost”
For first-time readers of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, the temptation (pardon the pun) to be “for” or “against” Satan is great. After all, Satan makes his plight compelling with many soliloquies and daring adventures across the universe. He is a charismatic figure.
Among critics, there are broadly three camps for understanding Satan’s role in the poem: those who believe Satan is admirable, those who believe he is deplorable, and those who believe the question is ill-put, i.e., the poem is outside the scope of moral matters. I want to introduce William Blake’s interpretation of Satan in this post. Blake falls squarely in the Satan as admirable camp and has, for better or worse, become one of the earliest “Satanist” critics. I will refer to Peter Schock’s 1993 essay “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Blake’s Myth of Satan and Its Cultural Matrix” for most of the information about the Romantic poet and his interpretation.
William Blake was unusual even for his time. Born in London in the latter half of the 18th century, his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a book of poetry, prose, and singular illustrations, is written after two significant political upheavals, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Blake consorted with political radicals like American Thomas Paine. He critiqued the Christian story of Satan as “…a universal fable appropriated by institutional Christianity to gain power.” (Schock, p. 443) In this milieu, Blake was charged to rethink the depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost as the story of a being who righteously opposes the existing order of the universe. Blake reinterpreted Satan as not merely the poem’s formal hero, a point of little dispute, but a sublime agent who resists the power of an arbitrary being.
What allows Blake to read Satan’s opposition to God as a heroic endeavor? His metaphysics requires some unpacking, so let’s examine them. Blake says that “desire” and “energy” are not inherently good or evil, but they are contrary to other human aspects like “reason.” In passages from Marriage such as: “Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy…” Blake describes religion as a battle between these two opposing aspects. If Satan is emblematic of desire and energy because he is “evil,” he pursues the ends of his desires with dogged persistence.
We come to the end of this quick examination of Blake with the question; did Blake get Milton’s Satan right? The answer depends on what you think a good interpretation of literature looks like. The greatest defect of Blake’s interpretation of Satan is that it relies so little on actual engagement with the poem. A sustained analysis of the poem requires consistent engagement with the words of the text, and Blake, alas, does not quote from it with any consistency. An initial challenge for the Blakean reading of the poem is whether or not it fits with any of the poem’s passages about Satan and how the author describes him.
