Any book that sets out to make connections between Milton and our contemporary world has to discuss the controversy generated by John Carey’s piece onSamson Agonistes and 9/11, published in theTLS in September 2002. Is Milton’s Samson, in effect, “a suicide bomber” who “believes that his massacre is an expression of God’s will”? Does the poem glorify him as a hero or is it a “drastic rewriting” of the Samson story that “calls into question Samson’s motivation”?
Faisal G. Mohamed has written about this question before, and he expands on his views here. He has a lot more to say about other ways of reading that he groups under the unfortunate heading of “the post-secular present”, but the book moves steadily towards the discussion ofSamson Agonistes, and these are the clearest and most convincing chapters. First, however, we have to labour through some rather turgid discourse about what post-secular might mean, occasionally enlivened by such ideas as the thought, quickly rejected, of Milton marching on Washington.
