Five great darknesses in literature

Stuart Kelly is the literary editor of Scotland on Sunday and a freelance critic and writer. He is the author of The Book of Lost Books and Scott-Land.

One of five great darknesses in literature he identified for the Guardian:

Milton

"No light, but rather darkness visible": in 10 syllables Milton conjures the paradox of Hell. What makes these lines so moving is not just the intellectual sprezzatura (his Inferno is not geographical, like Dante, but metaphysical and impossible), but our knowledge that he was probably already blind when he dictated the line. In his ineffably moving sonnet "On His Blindness", Milton does not talk of his own sightlessness; rather, he turns an inner eye on "this dark world and wide". But it is his final work, Samson Agonistes, which confirms Milton as the poet of insight in sightlessness. As Samson says: "O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse". He – Milton or Samson – is not describing blindness here. He is describing depression and alienation and every single thing the existentialists worried about over their absinthes. "The sun to me is dark / And silent as the moon". The world is turned upside down, and the ideas have to be, in response. When the Devil is trounced in Paradise Regained, "Darkness now rose / As daylight sunk, and brought in louring Night / Her shadowy offspring, unsubstantial both, / Privation mere of light and absent day". For the blind Milton, there is no real darkness.

Read about another darkness Kelly identified.

Satan from Paradise Lost is among the 50 greatest villains in literature according to the (London) Telegraph and appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best devils in literature.

Paradise Lost also appears on Mullan's lists of ten of the best snakes in literature, ten of the best pieces of fruit in literature, ten of the best visions of hell in literature, ten of the best angels in literature, ten of the best visions of heaven in literature, ten of the best walled gardens in literature, and ten of the best coups de foudre in literature. It is also on Diane Purkiss' critic's chart of the best books on the English Civil War and Peter Stanford's list of the ten best devils in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue