Chapter 4 - Samson’s Modernity

Summary

Samson’s violence, his impulsive actions, his patriarchal threats toward Dalila, and his loathing of an ethnic Other make Samson Agonistes, it has been argued, the least modern of Milton’s last three major poems. Instead of the late equanimity of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, or the consistent temperance of the Son in Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes highlights tensions over the modern, as well as between the ancient and the modern, prompting readers of all three poems into reflecting on their own ideas of the modern. Milton’s version of the Samson story calls the question: precisely because it is the third and last of his late poems, Samson Agonistes puts readers in an untenable place of dialectic and decision between the three late poems’ visions of modernity.