Better to Rule in Hell . . .

I must confess from the outset to an absolute antipathy to John Milton that is entirely divorced from his poetry.  Ever since earliest childhood, as far back as the first time I read about Edgehill and Naseby and Marston Moor, I have been an unrepentant Cavalier and have roundly despised the Parliamentarians.  I would like to believe that I based this upon the iconoclasm and know-nothingism of a Puritanism that regarded a theatre performing "Hamlet" or "Twelfth Night" as a den of iniquity that could not be suffered to remain open, but this may be a rank misremembrance.  Quite frankly, to an eight-year-old mind brought up on Howard Pyle and Bulfinch, Charles the First was close enough in kinship to King Arthur to render my regard for Cromwell not very far distant from utter detestation.  An introduction to the Earl of Montrose not many years later only served to confirm the prejudice in favor of the monarchical principle, one broad enough to shadow even Louis Seize under its legitimist penumbra.

That said, I must admit that Bloom's sketch made me want to plug one glaring leak in the dike of my education by reading the poem for the first time in the very near future, and this notwithstanding Bloom's uncharacteristic hagiographical lapse:

"The aesthetic puzzle of his poem is its scalding, taunting God, who is simply a great poet's blunder." (p. 56)

The long passages he quotes surprised me by their quality (I had rather expected something very much like Spenser) and my experience of other contemporaneous lyrics of Puritan provenance, like the execrable George Herbert, had not intimated that Milton would be capable of such extended verbal alchemy as these examples tend to prove; his lyrics, which I must have experienced at some point, never struck me as memorable.

Apparently, my error.