ABSTRACT
In 2006 a new study of Milton's influence on contemporary ideology was published called Delirious Milton, written by Gordon Teskey. The nature of Milton's critical reception in the Romantic period evolved, as did much of its poetic assumptions, from the work of earlier writers. Teskey places Milton at the dawn of Modernism and in doing so augurs a new rift in the text of Paradise Lost. Milton's Satan is the most thunderstruck of all characters and so for Burke he not only provides a source of, but also undergoes the affects of, the Miltonic sublime. The danger of Burke's sublime manifesto is that the reader leaves Paradise Lost a 'bottomless' poem. In discussing the sublime in the eighteenth century, it would of course be wrong to focus solely on Burke. Dryden recasts Milton's Satan as Lucifer and begins his 'Opera' in Pandemonium; the focus of the drama is primarily upon Eden and the moment of the Fall.
