ABSTRACT
John Dennis recognized the political stakes of John Dryden's popular State of Innocence and its threat to Milton's difficult, complicated, and controversial poem. Dennis's enthusiastic and somewhat obsessive approach to literary criticism – and his endeavor to be the first professional English literary critic – put him on the wrong side not only of Dryden but of the “wits” who were just then gearing up for a culture war against the “dunces.” However, his deliberate, critical approach to Paradise Lost provided an alternate way to deal with the challenges presented by Milton's poem. This chapter demonstrates that Dennis's most important (and hitherto overlooked) response to the difficult religious and political freight of Paradise Lost was to develop a psychologically grounded theory of the religious sublime to explain how Milton's epic works and to demonstrate how the moderns could exceed the ancients. Unique among early readers, Dennis sought acceptance for Paradise Lost not by excising the political anxieties it produced, but by embracing them.
