MILTON’S SATAN

(1) Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as
expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake that he could ever have been intended for the
popular personification of evil . . . Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to
his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent
in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph
inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy . . . Milton has so far violated the
popular creed . . . as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his
Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the
supremacy of Milton’s genius.
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)

(2) Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of
egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. To place this lust of self
in opposition to denial of self or duty, and to show what exertions it would make, and
what pains endure to accomplish its end, is Milton’s [purpose]. But around this
character he has thrown a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined
splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity.
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Unassigned Lecture Notes)

(3) What the Satanic predicament consists in is made clear by Satan himself. On his
own showing he is suffering from ‘a sense of injured merit’ (I. 98). This is a well-known
state of mind which we can all study in domestic animals, children, film-stars,
politicians, or minor poets; and perhaps nearer home . . . [Satan’s] rebellion means
misery for the feelings and corruption for the will, [and] Nonsense for the intellect.
(C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost)

(4) The fact that conventional heroism, as we have it in Classical epic and medieval
and Renaissance romance, is associated with the demonic in Milton means that
Paradise Lost is a profoundly anti-romantic and anti-heroic poem. Most of us live our
lives on a roughly human level, but if we meet with some setback, snub . . . or other
humiliation we are thrown back on something that will support and console us, and
unless we are saints that something is likely to be the ego. The sombre, brooding,
humourless ego . . . drives us to look for compensation. If in this state we read Milton,
we shall find his Satan . . . a congenial and sympathetic figure. If we later regain a better
sense of proportion, we may understand something of the profundity and accuracy of
Milton’s conception of evil.
(Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epic)