ABSTRACT
It is one of the ironies of literary history that Milton’s place in the history of aesthetics has been largely determined by eighteenth-century readers who praised the stylistic sublimity of Paradise Lost. As Nicholas von Maltzahn has recently argued, this “aestheticizing” reading of Milton’s forceful style to the exclusion of all else resulted in the depoliticization and secularization of his work. Milton, that is, was one of our first victims of aesthetic ideology: against his own stringent emphasis on ethical deliberation, his high style was interpreted as an instance of the “pathetic sublime” and appropriated for the theatrical and sentimental politics of the Restoration. In the context of civil war and Restoration politics, however, it is surely more appropriate to see Milton as one of our earliest critics of aesthetic ideology, that is, of the purely affective response to the work of art that places art in the service of the political status quo.1 This is particularly the case with Samson Agonistes, the poem in which Milton is most explicitly engaged with theatrical culture of the Restoration. Central to this poem is an attack on effeminizing pity, compassion, and sympathetic identification that foreshadows modern critiques of aesthetic ideology in the work of Benjamin and Brecht. Reading Milton alongside these modern theorists may help to produce a different history of aesthetics, one in which stylistic and political alienation is central, while compassion is disreputable.
