"Milton's admirer's [are] divided into roughly two camps. One tradition, running from Addison to C.S. Lewis, held that Paradise Lost is a great poem because its justification of God is largely successful. A rival tradition, running from William Blake to William Empson, held that the poem is great because it expresses unconscious hostility toward God. Blake famously wrote that Milton was 'a true poet of the Devil's party without knowing it.' Many have dismissed this comment as incorrigibly eccentric, but Blake and his successors hold one advantage over their critical adversaries. They can point for support to Milton's political career. Milton, like Satan, was a rebel in a civil war [against Charles II].

Why then did he choose a poetic subject that seems to concede everything to the Royalist cause? C.S. Lewis, writing in 1942, argued that the problem disappears when we consider one simple truth: Charles Stuart is not God. Milton's entire case against the divine right of kings is that divine right arrogates a dominion that belongs to God alone. Earthly kings like Charles Stuart merely play at being God; God does not play at being himself. It follows that what would be tyranny in Charles Stuart is perfect justice in God. Lewis' argument works in theory, but many readers of Paradise Lost still find Satan's rhetoric of rebellion to be seductive in practice."


-----John K. Leonard, The New York Review of Books, review of "How Milton Works" by Stanley Fish