Bate, Jonathan. "Series Editor’s Preface." Raising Milton’s Ghost: John Milton and the Sublime of Terror in the Early Romantic Period. By Joseph Crawford. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. v–vi. Science, Ethics and Society. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <>.

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Series Editor’s Preface

Jonathan Bate

In a poem called ‘London, 1802’, William Wordsworth wrote ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: / England hath need of thee …’ Why did the England of the period around the turn of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth have particular need of Milton? That is the question to which Joseph Crawford’s book offers the fi rst proper answer. It has long been known that the major Romantic writers were all obsessed with John Milton and his great English epic poem Paradise Lost. William Blake imagined the spirit of Milton entering him via the left foot and inspiring him to write his own epic poetry. It was indeed in the course of the preface to his long visionary poem Milton that Blake wrote his most famous lyric, ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ – it was Milton who enabled him to imagine the building of a New Jerusalem among England’s dark Satanic mills. Wordsworth’s epic endeavour, The Recluse (which was never fi nished, but which resulted in his two vast poems The Prelude and The Excursion) was conceived as a conscious over-going of Paradise Lost. Keats gave up his Hyperion because he thought that he could not match up to Milton’s high example. Percy Shelley dreamed of the rising of Milton’s ghost and Mary Shelley included Paradise Lost among the most signifi cant reading matter of her Creature in Frankenstein. Twentieth-century literary critics paid close attention to these relationships. Blake’s pronouncement in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that ‘Milton was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’ has provoked a wealth of strong critical commentary on the charisma of the fi gure of Satan and its infl uence on radical Romanticism. Indeed, Harold Bloom’s much discussed theory of ‘The Anxiety of Infl uence’, in which a quasi-Oedipal sense of the authority of the poetic ‘father’ is both the spur and the inhibitor of creativity, was developed out of his reading of the Romantics’ reading of Milton. But, as Crawford points out, even the richest of our critical accounts of the Romantics reading Milton have been conducted in an historical vacuum. Crawford is the fi rst to ask how ordinary readers – not to mention editors and biographers, journalists and politicians – raised the ghost of England’s great republican writer during the turbulent decade of the 1790s. Wordsworth’s desire for Milton to come back to life makes fresh sense in the light of

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Crawford’s fascinating historical research, such as his account of the poet Helen Maria Williams’ description of a scene at the Jacobins Club, Paris, in 1792: ‘The names of Milton, of Locke, and of Hampden, re-echoed through the hall, where it was proposed that their busts should also in short time be placed.’ Twentieth-century literary studies often suffered from a divide between formalism, the close reading of texts, on the one hand, and historicism, the contextual placing of texts, on the other. The WISH List endeavours to break down such disciplinary divides as those between literature and history. Raising Milton’s Ghost is an eloquent and original model of how research in the historical archive can complement the investigation of literary genealogies, and vice-versa.

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