Presented at the CiRCE National Conference 2023.

John Milton is one of the supremely powerful minds of Western culture. His poetry and his politics worked together to bring him to the heights of power, fame, and influence—but also served to bring him to denunciation, humiliation, hiding, and imprisonment. Figurations of Power of all kinds form a central trope across the Miltonic corpus, from the ‘dreaded infants hand’ of Christ in his early Nativity Ode to the offering of power by the Devil to Christ in Paradise Regained at the end of his life. What does the blind poet say about Power and Glory? Is power glorious? Is glory powerful?