Irene Montori

Iconoclasm – the destruction and defacement of stained-glass windows, statues, church paintings and ornaments – has been widely acknowledged to play a central part in the Reformation. Iconoclastic acts intensified under Charles I in opposition to the religious policy of Archbishop Laud. Moreover, the resurgence of an iconoclastic zeal in the midseventeenth century invested not only the idolatry of religious images but also the divinely appointed monarch. Milton’s iconoclastic impulses are distinctively displayed in his Eikonoklastes as a response to Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, a book of royalist propaganda. In his rebuttal, Milton performs iconoclasm by shattering the image of the king as the greatest martyr of his age. The questioning upon the defacement of signs and idols of superstition continued till the very end of the poet’s career with Samson Agonistes, whose protagonist pulls down the temple and theatre of Dagon. Whilst there is ample evidence of his engagement with iconoclasm in his prose and poetry, the English author did not smash paintings and images under a hammer or a crowbar. Furthermore, elsewhere in his writing, Milton resorted to iconicity as a vehicle to represent his poetry. He famously pervaded his poetry with visual representations of monuments and, what is even more interesting, he aimed to write poetry that would serve as his lasting monument. How should we then interpret his fascination with funeral monuments, which were often the object of Puritan iconoclasm? What kind of iconoclast was Milton? Is it possible to reconcile his iconoclastic and iconic impulses? The paper will attempt to answer these questions by focusing on Milton’s conception of printed books as embodied vessels that preserve and convey the quintessence of the author’s soul. Seen in this light, Milton’s destruction of Eikon Basilike is a direct attack on the king’s textual agency, rather than on his idol. By reading Milton’s representations of poetry as a funeral monument, I hope to move beyond the idea of Milton as iconoclast and to draw attention to the permanence of the printed memorial as a vehicle for the author’s immortality.