ABSTRACT
Romantic readers like Percy Shelley and William Blake, rather use John Milton’s picture of Satan as a way of exposing something crucial about the complex, dynamic system of religious values and images which are taken over and re-imagined in Paradise Lost as a whole. Shelley’s comments on Satan in his Defence of Poetry are keyed to his central argument that the “truths” of inherited theologies must be seen as, at best, the remnants of calcified effects of prior poetic intuitions rather than the proper causes or grounds of new creation. The sophisticated ironies of Romantic readers help one describe this appeal, but for the moment some flatter, more awkward impressions may do just as well. Prometheus is a more poetical character than Satan because, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest.
