Un-American Milton: Milton's Reputation and Reception in the Early United States

Recent accounts of Milton in early America manifest a tendency towards de-historicizing revisionism, overestimating the degree to which Milton's radicalism was 'mainstream,' and thereby underestimating the way Milton's originality set many American writers at odds with the conventions of their time.Joel Barlow and Herman Melville illustrate the point. Rewriting Michael's vision of the future at the end of Paradise Lost, Barlow's Columbiad transforms Milton's typological understanding of history into an Enlightenment fantasy of progress by drawing on Milton's account of creation in Book VII. In collapsing the distinction between the pre- and the post-lapsarian, the poem thus questions the contemporary inhibiting power of the Fall – for in Barlow American commercial expansion appears 'always already' a manifestation of regeneration. In rewriting Milton's Paradise Regained as an allegory of capitalism, Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener moves in the opposite direction. Bartleby's intractability, his refusal to comply with his employer's request to share in the work of the other scriveners, invokes Jesus' refusal of Satan's worldly good sense, producing an immoveable unworldliness that calls into question the norms of quotidian American capitalism.