John Milton's Samson Agonistes: Deathly Selfhood

Critical attention to death in Samson Agonistes has been dominated by the question of whether Milton's drama glorified acts of religious terrorism, a question that involves death but unnecessarily narrows it. I seek to reframe our understanding of Samson by looking not only at his aggressive exploits, but also at his movement towards death. The poem illuminates Samson's development of what I call a 'deathly selfhood', which relies on an interior awareness of who he is, rather than on an outward manifestation of his abilities, and only becomes available to him as he nears death.