Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature by Reginald A. Wilburn (review)

Wilburn’s book sets out to explore a previously neglected area, Milton’s impact on early African-American literature. Like the British Romantics before them, nineteenth-century African American writers embraced Milton as a pioneer of liberty, and used him for their own political purposes, while simultaneously appealing to his position in the literary canon for validation.

The book is divided into a theoretical first chapter, followed by chapters on Phillis Wheatley, early black orators and pamphleteers, Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Sutton E. Griggs, and an epilogue on Malcolm X. In conjunction with his Christian ethos, Milton’s poetry becomes an inspiration for these black writers who “recognized freedom and its pursuit as a political ministry divinely sanctioned by God” (16).

Wilburn is strictly interested in the type of intertextuality that designates “the semantic and cultural presupposition that lie between two texts and allow both of them to have the meaning that they do” (172). This theoretical statement is important to keep in mind, given the dearth of textual evidence in this 392-page book. In most cases, the authors never mentioned Milton in their writings, and they may or may not have encountered his work directly. Yet, Wilburn finds Milton’s influence everywhere: in the texts’ formal and rhetorical choices, specific turns of phrase, or overall tenor. Thus, Chapter Two discovers “traces of Miltonic presence” in Phillis Wheatley’s use of blank verse in her elegies (60). Chapter Three claims that early African-American orators and pamphleteers “specifically structured their orations with Milton in mind” (137) in their black jeremiads. Chapter Four discusses Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography, arguing that Douglass’s fragmentary encounter with Book 6 of Paradise Lost reproduced in a primer the abolitionist read, is bound to have shaped the writer’s style in delivering his subsequent anti-slavery messages (158).

Even the lack of any reference to Milton in a text becomes a submerged Miltonic presence. In Chapter Five, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper is said to signal Milton’s influence on her work by choosing to publish Moses (1869) in a two-text format. At the same time, her idiosyncratic use of blank verse stands for Harper’s “wayward or demonic approach to Miltonic engagement” (199) and artistic independence from Milton’s authority.

In the first chapter, Wilburn argues that it is impossible for any post-Miltonic English-language poet to refer to Satan without implicitly referring to Milton (50). Consequently, all literary references to Satan, hell, or revolt are read as intentional, overt engagements with the poet. Chapter Six deals with Anna Julia Cooper’s feminist critique of patriarchy, which appropriates Milton by sharing his demonic revolt against authority (236). Similarly, in Chapter Seven, Sutton E. Griggs’s black nationalism in Imperium in Imperio (1899) “instantly invites an intertextual association with Milton” in their shared “themes of subterranean rebellion and liberty” (291). Furthermore, given Imperium’s indebtedness to Thomas Jefferson’s political philosophies and Jefferson’s own debt to Milton’s ideas on liberty, Griggs becomes “a Miltonic heir by intertextual default” (283).

The epilogue analyzes the Miltonian influence in Malcom X’s articulation of black nationalism. Given his conversion to Islam, X reads Milton’s biblical symbolism from outside the Christian tradition and self-consciously identifies with Satan’s radical energies in Paradise Lost in his scathing critique of racial inequality in the U.S. As Wilburn puts it, “Unlike Milton, Malcolm is of the devil’s party and he knows it” (328).

Wilburn accomplishes what he set out to do, in as much as he firmly situates early African-American writers within the framework of English literature. His book convincingly illuminates the stylistic, thematic, and rhetorical affinities of early African-American writing with the larger English literary tradition, as well as the writers’ own agency in making this tradition their own. Unfortunately, this important and fascinating story often gets obscured...