Orpheus Dis(re)membered : Milton and the Myth of the Poet-hero

Orpheus is one of a number of mythical heroes against whose image Milton fashions a sense of himself as a heroic writer, publicly and personally engaged in the politics of Commonwealth and post-Commonwealth England. how do the various guises of Orpheus (the archetypal but failing poet, the passionate but guilty lover, the victim of mob violence, the civilizer of men) contribute to Milton's conception of heroism and heroic authorship? With the assistance of Mikhail Bakhtin's work on the conepts of 'author' and 'hero', as well as recent feminist interpretations of Milton, this study examines Milton's use of the Orpheus myth across the range of his writing, from the early poetry through the prose tracts, to Paradise Lost.