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Jefferson (Re)Reading Milton

Hugh Jenkins

Both historians and literary critics have often noted the striking parallels between John Milton and Thomas Jefferson, two great radicals in what J. G. A. Pocock has labeled the "Atlantic Republican tradition." Milton was one of Jefferson's favorite poets, along with Shakespeare, Pope, and Ossian; in fact, Jefferson's youthful Literary Commonplace Book in cludes more citations of Milton than any other English poet. Jefferson had recourse to Milton on important political issues as well, citing both Of Reformation and The Reason of Church Government in his "Notes on Episcopacy" (1776), part of his work in the Virginia Assembly on disestablishment that was later to develop into his famous "Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom." This statute, along with The Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia, was one of the three achievements Jefferson thought worthy of commemoration in his epitaph; Jefferson's pride in his service to his young country in the areas of religious toleration, education, and personal liberty parallels Milton's boast in his Second Defense of the English People that in service to the commonwealth he engaged himself in the defense of "three species of liberty which are essential to the happiness of social life-religious, domestic, and civil." Thus it seems safe to say, with Lydia Dittler Schulman, that Jefferson saw in Milton a mirror image for his own concerns, "a champion of individual liberties against oppressive institutions, an eloquent and impassioned spokesman for freedom of religion and of the human spirit" (129).¹

Not surprisingly, discussions of the parallels between these two republican champions have tended to focus on Jefferson's attraction to the revolutionary heroism of the early books of Paradise Lost. The evidence of the Literary Commonplace Book does show Jefferson anticipating Blake and Shelley in his admiration for Satanic defiance: of his twenty-nine citations of the epic, nearly a third (nine) are from the first two books, or describe the fallen angels. Seven are spoken by or describe Satan himself. As Tony Davies has remarked, Jefferson's reading of the poem "might be called Satan Agonistes," and Davies, in common with others, links such a reading to "the core mythology and subjectivity of the revolutionary enterprise" for Jefferson (258, 260). Contemporaries also found the comparison to Satan irresistible: Jefferson's political enemies several times compared him to Milton's arch-fiend (Schulman, 205-06; Sensabaugh, 252, 256 -57).

But most of Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book was the product of his early years, recorded for the most part between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Its most recent editor, Douglas Wilson, has argued that in general it shows a Jefferson "very different . . . from the familiar figure of history," one "scarcely concerned with politics" (3-4). The end of the Jefferson's "commonplacing" largely coincides with the beginning of his political career, and "the close conjunction of these developments is probably no accident, for Jefferson's deep involvement in politics brought about dramatic and permanent changes in both his life and in what one biographer has called the 'contours of his mind'" (Wilson, 4, citing Peterson, 37). If Jefferson's literary interests did indeed wane as his political interests grew during the period of the Revolution, they seem to have revived after it. We can thus be grateful that the Library of America's Thomas Jefferson: Writings (published in 1984) has included a complete and modern edition of his "Thoughts on English Prosody" (1786), which allows us a close look at Jefferson's mature tastes in and views on poetry. ² In this treatise, as in The Literary Commonplace Book, Milton remains the most cited poet, though many of the citations are not credited or fully annotated. Part of the purpose of this article is simply to supply that annotation. But in his "Thoughts" Jefferson cites for the first time a number of new passages from Paradise Lost as well, passages which cast light on how Milton's poetry influenced the mature Jefferson, both in the period between two great revolutions and afterwards.

Jefferson's re-reading of Milton was apparently prompted by his purchase of a new copy of Paradise Lost during his trip to England in early 1786 to visit John Adams, the new confederation's ambassador to England. ³ On his return, Jefferson found time from his duties as minister plenipotentiary to France to write his treatise, which he sent in October of that year to the Marquis de Chastellux, at least ostensibly [End Page 32] for the reasons given in his introductory letter:

Among the topics of conversation which stole off like so many minutes the few hours I had the happiness of possessing you at Monticello [in 1782], the measures of English verse was one. I thought it depended like Greek and Latin verse, on long and short syllables arranged into regular feet. You were of a different opinion.

Jefferson admits he began his treatise "with the design of converting you to my opinion," but "ended by discovering that you were right." Thus, in typical Jeffersonian fashion, he took up as his "next object . . . to find out the real circumstances which give harmony to English poetry and laws to those who make it" (593). What follows is for the most part a rather dry, scholarly exposition, based largely on Samuel Johnson's adaptation of classical measures into English prosody in his prefatory material to his Dictionary, and containing chapters on subjects like "Elision," "Synecphonesis," and "Rules of Accent."

What is more interesting than what Jefferson discusses is the material he uses to discuss it. Although the largest number of the lines Jefferson cites belong to William Shenstone, Milton, as noted before, still accounts the largest number of citations (20). ⁴ About half of the passages from Paradise Lost Jefferson cites are from his Literary Commonplace Book, which he had had bound in Philadelphia before his departure and had brought with him to France. Most of these, surprisingly, are not from the first two books, but rather from the later books of the epic. Book Five is represented by "Love unlibidinous resigned [sic; for "reign'd"], nor jealousy" (449); Book Six by part of Abdiel's reply to Satan, "Behests obey, worthiest to be obeyed" (184). Book Eight has a curiously large number of citations: a line of Adam's discussion of knowledge with Raphael, "From use obscure and subtle, but to know" (192); one of Adam's request to God for a mate, "Which must be mutual in proportion due" (385); one of Adam's discussion of Eve's charms, "Too much of ornament in outward show" (538); and two lines from Raphael's warning to Adam about his duties toward Eve, "Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love" (569), and "Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right" (572). Book Nine is represented by a line from Adam's argument with Eve against separation, "The tempted with dishonor foul, supposed" (297); Book Ten by two lines of Adam, one from his agonized reflections, "Be it so, for I submit, his doom is fair" (769), and one from his misogynist outburst against Eve, "Well if thrown out as supernumerary" (887). The only remaining line of Satanic defiance from the Literary Commonplace Book is "To do good never will be our task" (1.159)--which Jefferson significantly pairs with Abdiel's response to Satan from Book Six, which I have already cited (see page 602).

This conjunction (the lines spoken by Satan and Abdiel are widely separated in the Literary Commonplace Book) suggests a Jefferson more ambi valent about Satan's allure than in his youth. Such a possibility seems borne out by the fact that Jefferson omits the other six citations of Satan (along with one from Mammon, and one describing the fallen angels' fate) from the Literary Commonplace Book (1.56-57, 105-116, 252-55, 261-63, 527-30, 645-49; 2.254-57; 6.380). These include some of the famous lines of Satanic defiance, including "All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, / And study of Revenge, immortal Hate / And courage never to submit or yield," and "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." Instead, Jefferson substitutes seven new quotations from Book One, six in one large but discontinuous citation (605). Two of these are in line with the Literary Commonplace Book, in the defiant mode: the description of Dagon as "He also against the house of God was bold" (1.470), and Satan's cry for war against Heaven, war which "Open or understood must be resolv'd" (1.662). Yet as in the case with Satan and Abdiel before, here too Jefferson joins these lines with others emphasizing Satanic pathos or failure, the former being paired with "Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain" (1.470), the latter with "All her original brightness, nor appear'd" (1.592). The other two new citations (which come between these pairs) are the neutral ""Of Phlegma [sic; for "Phlegra"] with the heroic race was joined" (1.577), and "Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisbond" (1.524). One wonders at the slip of "Phlegma" for "Phlegra."

The other new citations of Milton similarly bear out the possibility of Jefferson working out a new, [End Page 33] more dialectical reading of Paradise Lost. These, the longest citations of Milton in the treatise, all come in his last topic of discussion, "Length of Verse," which climaxes with a description of iambic pentameter blank verse (613-22). Such verse Jefferson calls "the most precious part of our poetry": only here "the poet, unfettered by rhyme, is at liberty to prune his diction of those tautologies, those feeble nothings necessary to introtrude [sic] the rhyming word. With no other trammel than that of measure he is able to condense his thoughts and images and to leave nothing but what is truly poetical." "Liberty" is the key word here. Jefferson's own language rises with the sentiment, and he concludes by, in effect, concurring with an overthrow--albeit in a modest way--of those "customs" and "laws" he himself had sought to find: "When enveloped in the pomp and majesty of his subject he [the poet] sometimes even throws off the restraint of the regular pause" (618). The sentiment seems mildly Satanic. To illustrate this liberty, he not surprisingly cites two long passages from Milton; yet they are not ones that might have been expected of the youthful Jefferson. Rather, they are

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse! that on the sacred top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning, how the Heavens and Earth
Rose out of Chaos. (1.1-10)

And

Then stay'd the fervid wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things[:]
One foot he centred, and the other turn'd
Round, through the vast profundity obscure
And said, "Thus far extend." (7.224-30)

Neither of these passages had caught his eye when Jefferson was compiling his Literary Commonplace Book. The question is, then, why would Jefferson now so value these passages and others from Paradise Lost, passages emphasizing less heroic defiance than poetic creation, a more creative rather than Satanic and rebellious "liberty"? Jefferson's final citation of Milton may provide a warning against trying to answer this question too definitively. For just after extolling these passages for their "majesty of rhythm and sense," Jefferson cites a later passage on the creation from Book Seven (ll. 261-64) and compares it unfavorably to its original in Genesis (1:6). Jefferson concludes that Milton's verse here lacks "the sentiment, diction, [and] measure of poetry," and dismisses it with a Satanic adverb as "servilely copied" (619). Jefferson in fact concludes his discussion of English verse by noting that for the young there is attraction in "any composition . . . which unites a little sense, some imagination, and some rhythm . . . . But as we advance in life these things fall off one by one, and I suspect we are left at last with only Homer and Vergil, perhaps with Homer alone." To prove his point, he cites numerous passages of Shenstone, Gray, and Collins, pieces which "are seldom read twice" (619-22).

We must remember, finally, that Jefferson cites a majority of his Milton passages as part of technical expositions of poetic accent and rhythm. Still, Jefferson himself stated that when composing his "Thoughts," he "chose the most pregnant passages, those wherein every word teems with latent meaning" (Randall, 441). Willard Sterne Randall, one of the few Jefferson scholars to discuss the "Thoughts" in any detail (even Malone mentions it only once, and then in passing [1:393]), speculates that the "meaning" Jefferson conveys is related to the affair he reputedly carried on with Maria Cosway during the year he composed his treatise (441-42). Such a theory may account for the absence of Miltonic misogyny, so prominent in the Literary Commonplace Book, in the "Thoughts." ⁵ But it scarcely accounts for the new "meaning" Jefferson seems to have gleaned from Para dise Lost at this time. That meaning, as we have seen, seems to center on a rereading of the epic that in effect redefines the meaning of "liberty" that Jefferson took from the poem. [End Page 34]

That meaning seems at least in part closely connected with the impact of France on Jefferson, and the impact of Milton on pre-Revolutionary France. Most Jefferson scholars agree that his sojourn in France played a critical role in Jefferson's intellectual and political development. Malone notes how France seasoned Jefferson intellectually; if he was Minister Plenipotentiary for the Confederation to France, he was a "a minister of enlightenment" from France to his own country (2: 14-20, 82-111). Randall presents the trip to France more dramatically as Jefferson's "Rubicon": "he was leaving behind parochial American society and politics and a provincial view of innate American superiority to eventually become America's best traveled, most cosmopolitan president" (367). But at the same time, as Peterson has put it, "in the act of discovering Europe, Jefferson discovered America as well . . . America as a spiritual ideal, harbinger of a new era, vision of an earthly paradise, bearer of the hopes of mankind" (331). Such an idealized vision of America was also that of the French philosophes and physiocrats, of, in particular, Condorcet and Mirabeau. ⁶ Recently John T. Shawcross and Tony Davies have discussed the impact of Milton's prose works, especially those focusing on civil liberties, on the philosophes of the 1780s. Their radical thought, Davies argues, shifted the early American emphasis on the anti-prelatical and -monarchical Milton to "the marginally less perilous ground of private and civil liberty, constructing an alternative canon of the prose Milton," a canon focusing on "the Doctrine and Discipline, the Defences, above all Areopagitica." Mirabeau himself had trans lated Areopagitica, and consequently Davies, citing Olivier Lutaud, notes it could be said that "Milton 'opened the States General' in 1788" (264-65, 269; see also Shawcross, 112-21).

Such was the atmosphere in which Jefferson's political thoughts matured, an atmosphere rife with Miltonic ideas and imagery. But to restrict such ideas and imagery to the prose works is to overlook the inspirational powers of Milton's poetic creativity, as I hope my discussion of Jefferson's "Thoughts" has indicated. Similarly, to restrict Milton's influence on Jefferson to the time of his sojourn in France is equally misleading. In the "Thoughts," Jefferson's citations of Milton revise his earlier admiration of Satanic heroism by balancing Satan's defiance with Abdiel's obedience, Satan's resolution with his pathos. Such a dialectic approach would become common in Jefferson's mature thought, and particularly of his vision of America itself and the American ideal (Marx, 135, 139; Pocock, 539-41). This dialectic can be seen in another work Jefferson composed at roughly the same time as his "Thoughts," the "Dialogue Between My Head & Heart" (866-77). Written to Maria Cosway, this dialogue shows Jefferson in the agonies of romantic separation, and it contains moments of near-Satanic despair. But significantly, the agony extends to Jefferson's separation from his home country as well, so much so that the Head at times has to remind the Heart what the true subject of the dialogue is (871). Both the "Head" and "Heart" have extended apostrophes to America and the American people, apostrophes that praise American ingenuity in peace and valor in war, and that bear comparison to Milton's celebrations of the virtues of the English people in the perorations of Areopagitica and The Second Defense. That of the "Heart" is worth citing at length. After extolling the natural beauties of America, it focuses on

our own dear Monticello, where has nature spread so rich a mantle under the eye? mountains, forests, rocks, rivers. With what majesty do we there ride above the storms! How sublime to look down on the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! and the glorious sun when rising as if out of a distant water, just gilding the tops of the mountains, & giving life to all nature! (870)

Monticello is often described as one of the first attempts to create an English garden in America, with Shenstone's Leasowes as an inspiration (Nichols and Griswold, 79-81,96). This description, however, is more powerfully reminiscent of Milton's Eden than of anything created by Shenstone. ⁷ Jefferson seems to draw on Milton's depiction of Eden, which "Crowns with her enclosure green/As with a rural mound the champaign head/Of a steep wilderness," and is surrounded by "Nature boon/Pour'd forth profuse [End Page 35] on Hill and Dale and Plain" (Paradise Lost 4.133-35, 242-43). Monticello is, like Eden, a "happy rural seat of various view" (4.247). Indeed, Milton seems to have been on Jefferson's mind from his first days at Monticello; in a one of his first letters describing his new estate in 1771, Jefferson had resorted to "a Miltonic Stile" to capture its beauty (Adams, 46-47). ⁸ One could argue that this passage also shows Jefferson adopting the "Miltonic style" in his praise of Monticello. Just as earlier he had noted that "with no other trammel than measure," Milton's verse in Paradise Lost, "enveloped" (like Monticello itself) "in all the pomp and majesty of his subject" throws off restraint in the enthusiasm of creation, here too Jefferson's "Heart" rises above the bathos of frustrated love and reaches for a liberating vision, for something approaching a Miltonic sublime. Jefferson's imagined view from Monticello is like that he cites in the "Thoughts" of Milton's God in Book 7, who, at the moment of creation, unfolds his "golden compasses" with "one foot . . . centred," and surveys the "vast profundity obscure"--only here that profundity is the American frontier, itself a "sublime" mixture of beauty and chaos. Throughout his life, Jefferson would return always to this view of America from Monticello.

And from this view would emerge Jefferson's most famous myth, that of the "new Adam" celebrated in the Notes on Virginia, the American farmers who "are the chosen people of God . . . whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue" (290). Yet Jefferson's depiction of this new Adam, like Milton's depiction of Adam, is conditional and dialectical, as Leo Marx has noted. Milton celebrates Adam while acknowledging his predestined fall; Adam's heroism lies in the flawed yet incremental virtue he foresees and embraces in Book 12 of Paradise Lost. Similarly, Marx notes that "Jefferson . . . could not give full credence to the myth" of the ideal husbandman; he recognized "the constant need to redefine . . . the ideal, pushing it ahead, so to speak, into an unknown future to adjust it to everchanging circumstances" (143, 139). Of course, the Notes on Virginia was written before Jefferson had reread Milton for his "Thoughts." But Miltonic imagery would continually inform Jefferson's future reconsiderations of the American myth he had helped to create. Speaking of the fate of the American ideal during the War of 1812, he wrote to William Short that "our enemy has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from Paradise: from a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and manufacturing one." Here the destructive Satan of the "Thoughts" is equated with the country Jefferson saw as the implacable enemy of liberty, England, and its industrial threat to the American agricultural Eden--the "dark Satanic Mills," as they were called by another late eighteenth-century reader of Milton, William Blake. Yet the Satanic allure remained: in one of his last letters, Jefferson, surveying his victories and defeats, compared the struggles of the new nation to those of the English-speaking peoples still trying to overthrow the tyrannical effects of the Norman conquest. Jefferson ended this letter by citing Paradise Lost for one last time:

     What though the field is lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield. ⁹

Here the defiant Satan, the champion of liberty, is turned against the previous reference to destructive Satan, the enemy of liberty. The lines so prominently featured in the youthful Literary Commonplace Book are here reread in terms of the new concept of liberty that demanded their exclusion from the "Thoughts on English Prosody." This is the sort of dialectic, as we have seen, that defined the Jeffersonian vision of America. Thus it seems scarcely far-fetched to say that this dialectic was informed and in a significant way sustained by Jefferson's life-long (re)reading of his revolutionary forebear, Milton.

Union College

Notes

I would like to thank Owen and Barbara Jenkins of Carleton College, Jim McCord and Harry Marten of Union College, and Roy Flannagan, editor of Milton Quarterly, each of whom read this manuscript carefully and offered invaluable suggestions. Union College supplied funding for a research assistant, Jared Richman, without whose work this project might never have been completed.

1. Milton's influence on Jefferson is most fully charted by Sensabaugh, 135-46; see also Shawcross, 144, and particularly Davies, 254-71.

2. Prior to the Library of America's volume, Jefferson's treatise was available in print only through Lipscomb and Bergh's limited edition of Jefferson's writings (vol. 18:41-51), published 1903-04.

3. Jefferson apparently purchased a copy of the second issue of Simmons's 1669 edition of Paradise Lost: A Poem in Ten Books (Sowerby, 4: 425; I am grateful to John T. Shawcross for information about the specific issue). This copy, along with much of Jefferson's original donation to the Library of Congress, was unfortunately destroyed in a fire in 1851. Most of the citations in the Literary Commonplace Book are from Foulis's edition of 1750 or Fenton's of 1725 (see Wilson, 93, 98).

4. This total does not include one line Jefferson cites (with three others) as an instance of a medial trochee "taken from Milton": "Leans the huge elephant the wisest of brutes!" The line is not Milton's, but I have not been able to trace it to another poet. See "Thoughts on English Prosody," 602.

5. Present in the Commonplace Book but absent in the "Thoughts" are Adam's infamous description of Eve as "bestow'd" with "Too much of Ornament" (8.530-39) and Raphael's reply (8.567-78); his expostulations on Eve as "this fair Defect/Of Nature (10.881-98); and numerous misogynist passages from Samson Agonistes. A number of theories have been advanced for Jefferson's early fascination with such passages. Malone cites the disappointment of his failed courtship of Rebecca Burwell (1:84-85). This view now discredited, as handwriting analysis has shown most of the passages predate this occurrence. Mclaughlin has more speculatively argued that Jefferson's citations reflect his strained relationship with his mother (49-51). Whether it be because of his happy marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton or his later relationship with Maria Cosway, Jefferson seems to have outgrown at least such overt misogyny.

6. A less idealized view of Jefferson's sojourn in France emerges from Kaplan, who argues that Jefferson's "enthusiasm for the ideas of Frenchmen seemed restricted to philosophical methods and philosophical positions which agreed with his own preconceptions" (21).

7. Jefferson had visited Leasowes during his travels in England, and had been terribly disappointed. In his "Travel Journals," he described it as "not even an ornamented farm--it is only a grazing farm with a path around it, here and there a seat of board, rarely anything better. Architecture has contributed nothing. Shenstone . . . ruined himself by what he did to this farm" (Writings, 625).

8. Jefferson's original letter is lost; the citation comes from the reply by a "Mrs. Drummond": "Let me recollect Your description, which bars all the Romantic, Poetical ones I ever read . . . no pen but Yrs., cou'd (surely so butiful describe) espeshally, those few lines in the Miltonic Stile . . . ." As Hamilton goes on to say, "the reference to 'the Miltonic Stile' conjures up a letter laced with evocative paraphrases of Milton's description of the Garden of Eden" (46-47).

9. The letter to William Short (Nov. 28, 1814) is cited by Marx, 144; the letter to G.W. Lewis (25 October 1825) is cited by Davies, 257-58.

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