Milton’s Late Poems as Anti-Liturgy

Abstract

This essay suggests “anti-liturgy” to describe Milton’s three late poems as a unified project in devotional verse, and to account for their avant-garde impulse to make the present strange. These qualities are brought into conversation with the posture on liturgy in Milton’s early poems, with Milton’s remarks on justification in De doctrina Christiana, with Catherine Pickstock’s arguments on liturgy, and with Alain Badiou’s thought on poetry and truth. For the late Milton, knowledge of futurity is a potter’s vessel dashed to pieces in an encounter with the eternal.