Crèvecoeur's Miltonic Epic: Paradise Lost and the Subversive Structural Poetics of Letters from an American Farmer

Scholars have long argued over the form and organization of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from An American Farmer, but its structure and thematic concerns parallel those of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Both works chronicle a civil war dividing England; both works are divided into twelve parts; both works describe a nascent paradise; in both works, that paradise is disrupted in the ninth part; and in both works the perpetrators of that Fall metamorphose into snakes during the tenth part. These obvious topical and structural parallels represent a small fraction of the links that connect Crèvecoeur's most famous work to Milton and the epic tradition. Recognizing Milton as a key interlocutor for Letters foregrounds Crèvecoeur's both Loyalist sympathies and his rejection of Christian theodicies.