[In the following interview, conducted on December 10, 1977, Layton discusses social and religious history and ideas; the state of poetry in Canada; and his public image.]

[Sherman]: Throughout much of English literature one notes a Christianizing of the Old Testament and its figures. Good examples of this are to be found in the medieval passion plays as well as in Eliot's The Waste Land. Would it be fair to say that in your recent Yeshua poems you are rewriting the New Testament in terms of the Old?

[Layton]: That's certainly a very good way of putting it, because they Christianize not only the figures in the Old Testament—they have Christianized my brother, Yeshua! It's a lie to say that Jesus was the first Christian to die on the cross; he was not a Christian, he was a Jew, and he was a Jew that the Romans thought was a rebel and a subversive and one who possibly was going to lead some kind of revolt against the Roman Emperium. So there you already have a falsification of a Jew. For that matter I would say that the disciples of Jesus have been also falsified to appear as Christians when to my reading they were Jews! It's important to remember the first 15 bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, regarded themselves as Jews, obeyed the laws of the Torah, were not excommunicated from the congregation. The fact that they asserted that Jesus was the Messiah was not considered blasphemous and was no ground whatsoever for excommunicating them from the community. This process has gone on for many, many centuries so that today many people are totally unaware that Jesus himself was Jewish.

In your preface to For My Brother Jesus, you lambaste the Christians, attributing the Holocaust to the doctrines they preached for centuries. In The Covenant, you now make a distinction between the Christians and the Gentile heathens, or as you label them, the “Xians”. Is this distinction a cop-out? Do you, a “well-disciplined Zarathustrian,” truly feel there is a place for Christianity in today's world?

Why did I make a distinction? First of all my whole argument has been distorted because people prefer to distort an argument that they cannot answer. They create their own straw man. The point that I was making was that Christianity or Christendom, by publicizing a stereotype of the Jew for nearly two thousand years, prepared the soil on which the death camps and the crematoria could spring-up and flourish. That was my point. I wasn't making the point that Christians actually went ahead and murdered Jews or tortured Jews or killed Jews. Whether they were Christians or not Christians was irrelevant to my argument. My main argument was that Christianized Europe had a picture of the Jew which made him less desirable than vermin, or as I put it somewhere else, if Hitler had ordered the extermination of the canine population in Europe, it would have met more resistance than did his attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. And if he had wanted to exterminate the cat population all the cat lovers in Poland and France and Hungary would have been up in arms and said, “Oh no! you cannot do that to our lovely cats, our poor pets.” But with Jews it was different because the image of the Jew that Christianity, that is to say the churches and the priests and the bishops and the popes had propogated for so many centuries, made the Jew undesirable. And therefore to eliminate them nobody was going to protest or oppose. It's significant to recall that when Hitler wanted to exterminate the misfits in Germany the bishops went to see him and said “Oh no, you cannot do this; it is anti-Christian,” and the plan to exterminate the misfits was never carried through. But no such protest was raised by the bishops of Germany or the bishops of any other Christian country against the systematic extermination of the Jews.

So, the second part of my question: do you feel there is a place for Christianity in today's world, or do you think that Christianity is simply an evil which we've had to live with for the past two thousand years?

No, Christianity is not altogether an evil. My serious thinking on that has been that Christianity is Judaism with a nose job; that Christianity is a blend of Hebrew ethicism and Greco-Roman paganism—and now I am coming to the real kernel of the thing—that Christianity was a means, and perhaps the only means, whereby Hebrew ethicism could be propagated throughout the world. I think that the values that the Jews were the first to put forward, namely human dignity, freedom, love, creativity, all of the Judaic values, have been embodied in Christianity and have been spread to the four corners of the earth. We must remember that human beings are fallible, that there is always going to be a mixture of idealism and evil in whatever human beings do and Christianity, no more than Judaism or no less than Judaism or no less than Judaism or no less than Nationalism, will exhibit this mixture of idealism and evil. But the idealism was given to Christianity by the Jews and it is a dream by which we live. We hope that one day human beings will live together in peace and harmony. There will be brotherhood, fellowship, love, mutual helpfulness, co-operation, rather than strife and hatred. This is a Judaic dream, this is the dream which Christianity has carried to the four corners of the earth. Even if they pay only lip service to it, it's still something. It's an accomplishment.

Would it be fair to call Irving Layton, a Hebraic pagan?

I don't know whether it's fair or unfair until you tell me what you mean by this oxymoron, “Hebraic pagan.”

Well it seems that your recent emphasis on religion in your poetry has accentuated one of the problems I think critics have with your work, and that is that there seems to be a tension between the Hebrew concerns, the spiritual concerns, and the more pagan or physical concerns, and I think that a lot of critics have trouble coping with that. They feel that there's some basic contradiction.

There is a contradiction and it's a contradiction that I noted in a very early poem, “Vexata Quaestio,” the vexed question, in which I was really saying that Western man has in his psyche two opposing value systems: that given to him by the Hebrews and that given to him by the Greeks. The Hebrew believes that salvation can be only found in and through obedience to the behests of God and the Greek believes that salvation, though I don't think a Greek would use that word, can be found only in experiencing life as fully as possible. Now I don't think that anyone can ever reconcile these two opposing and contradictory commands. I think to be a Modern is to have that tension in one's soul, so that instead of calling me a Hebrew pagan, I would simply say that I am a Modern living in the modern twentieth-century world and that I exhibit these tensions.

So modern man is condemned to dualism.

Rather than dualism, I'd say tension.

In The Covenant you claim that a Jew is someone who chooses the qualities, human dignity, freedom, love and creativity. Then by your definition the poet Shelley was a Jew, as was D. H. Lawrence and others.

Oh, quite. I think that anyone on this planet who has ever affirmed those values is a Jew. It was a Jew who first brought in to the world the notion that there are values superior to that given to him by either his environment or his society, his nation, his state. That there has to be a striving for self-definition, for self-transcendence, a rising above mere physical appetites or material prosperity. These are the things that the Jew gave to the world and when a writer asks for a greater freedom or for a recognition of human dignity, any writer, whether it be Lawrence, Shelley, Byron, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, in effect he is expressing Judaic values and to my way of thinking, is a Jew. A Japanese poet or a Chinese poet who affirms these values, for me is a Jew. It may sound chauvinistic to say that he is a Jew, but the fact remains that I am using the word Jew as a rubric in view of the fact that the Jew was the first to put forward these values.

Yet D. H. Lawrence, especially in his book, Apocalypse, is very, very, critical of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition and I'm sure that he would have some misgivings about being called a Jew. Perhaps he wouldn't mind being called a pagan since he promotes paganism in much of his writing.

Yes, because there are elements, let's face it, there are elements in the Judaic-Christian tradition which are reprehensible, which I do not accept. There is certainly an anti-eroticism. There is a repressiveness. There is a nay saying. But for me that's the dark side of the doctrine. For me that's the dark side of the other things: creativity, freedom, human dignity and love. Also, I am aware that every orthodox religion is degradation of drama into dogma; that your great religious teachers come forth with a poetic idea of immense radiance and illumination and great power and then the followers, who are always lesser people, attempt to tidy the vision. They add certain elements from their own limited experience to the original vision of the great poets. And this is what happened to the Jewish tradition and to the Christian tradition. It's what happens to every great doctrine. Look what has happened to Communism, look what has happened to Socialism, look what has happened to Nationalism. Always this great volcanic burst of fervour and strength and eloquence and light, and then the lesser people getting on the band wagon, so to speak, holding on to the prophet's robes and reducing the thing to something which they can understand. So there is no reason why I have to accept the whole Judaic tradition as it has developed over the years. I am no friend to the rabbis. I never have been a friend to the rabbis. I am no friend to the narrow-minded Jewish bourgeoisie. I have excoriated them in language as scathing as any that I have used for our “Xians” or pseudo-Christians, let it not be forgotten. I am no friend to anyone who is narrow and bigoted and small-minded and above all, believes somehow or other that repression is the way to salvation.

When reading Layton I often get the feeling that he would be more comfortable living in Italy, Greece or some other Mediterranean country. Is much of your well-documented discontent with Canada merely the result of a Levantine soul having been misplaced in an Anglo-Saxon land?

I certainly would be more comfortable but I would not be one-tenth as productive. For me living in Canada has meant a very creative tension. I have been able to fortify myself by going to live in Greece and Italy and Israel from time to time, but I always come back here to cultivate my tensions and to make sure that my enemies and antagonists are alive and flourishing, for without them I don't know what I would do.

Have you seen any change in the sense of Canadian gentility which you have cried out against over the past 30, 40 years?

No, I haven't. It's taken a new form; it's masked itself, differently of course, but I don't think that gentility, or for that matter the accompanying philistinism, have changed very much. This has become more apparent to me than ever before, though I had intimations of it before the publication of For My Brother Jesus. But the publication of that volume a year ago, and now the publication of The Covenant, has convinced me that gentility is still there. The gap between rhetoric and experience, which is how I define gentility, is still as large as it ever was, and the attempt to maintain that gap, just as resolute. Well the poet lives with experience, articulates experience and his reaching comes from his experiencing the world at a particular time and place. He gives a report of it. That for me is the role of the poet in any given society. The rhetoric that he develops comes out of that experience.

In the preface to one of your poetry workshop collections, you stated there are 4 divisions in Canadian poetry: the Loyalists, the Indians, the Frygidians and the Jews. Do you still subscribe to such a classification?

Yes! I think on the whole the four categories give a fairly accurate picture of the writing in Canada.

Where would you put poets whom you admire, such as Pat Lane or Alden Nowlan?

Well, because they are poets perhaps I wouldn't put them in any category at all, poets being able to transcend categories; but I am aware that this is something of a cop-out. On the whole I think I would put them in the category of Loyalists. They are not Frygidians, they are not Jews and they are not Eskimos or Indians. But there is that Loyalist quality of being say, anti-American or suspicious of the modern experience or the un-willingness to immerse themselves in the destructive element. For me Jews, are those who have been willing to immerse themselves in the destructive element and have come out as survivors, maybe crippled survivors, but nevertheless, as survivors. Nowlan and Pat Lane have not immersed themselves in the destructive element.

How do you think the poetry scene today in Canada differs from what it was 20 or 30 years ago?

Several features are different. For one thing the sheer number of poets that we have today. Throw a stone and you're going to hit a poet. The outlets available to the poets. The grants made possible to them by the Canada Council and by Provincial governments. Their achievement of status which I think is the really great difference between now and then. I think of my friend, the late A. M. Klein, who was driven to madness and silence because the poet had no status at the time he was writing and I say to myself the tragedy of his life could certainly have been avoided had he been living today. So from the standpoint of the number of poets, the number of outlets and the status the poet enjoys today, there is an immense difference. O.K., one could say that all that is quantitative rather than qualitative. Qualitatively I think, and here I may be showing my grey hairs, that the poets of the 40's and 50's, were markedly better. They had a wider range, a greater vision, were more ambitious than the poets who are writing today. It seems to me that many of them are writing too much, they're writing too fast. There's a great hunger for recognition, poetry readings, the whole bit. So as in everything, this mixture of idealism and evil that I was talking about before, this too is manifesting itself in the poetry scene in Canada today.

Well what is it that you feel is most lacking in today's poetry?

What bothers me Ken, is that poets, by and large, are not concerning themselves with the large moral, political and psychological dilemmas; there's a kind of playing around with words, as though poems were puzzles. And the Black Mountain group, which has taken root in this country, exhibits this tendency most strongly. Reading their poems, it strikes me that there's no large emotion. Everything is reduced to playing with words. Also, there is a general lack of satire. Again, take the Black Mountain school. Their writers are devoid of wit, satire or humour. If only someone would remind Frank Davey and his disciples, that the poet used to be called “a wit”. They fall into the gentile tradition. You see, the poet in North America has become a surrogate for the priest and poetry readings have become a surrogate for church going. Think of the solemnity associated with poetry readings. You're supposed to leave feeling sanctified, saved, because of all things you've listened to Robert Creeley drone inaudibly some of his skinny poems. This solemnity reflects the real insecurity of the North American poet. In other words, when you have nothing to say, say it solemnly, grandly. Because the sense of salvation is very strong in North America. So if it isn't Jesus who will save you, then Robert Creeley will save you, or Robert Duncan will save you, but some Robert will save you with his lines! You know, there's no humour in the gospels either. That's what's wrong with the New Testament and that's what's at the root of all this poetic gentility. Every time someone comes out with a salvationist ideology, the one thing you notice is the absence of humour. No humour on Black Mountain; no humour in the New Testament; no humour in Lenin's Communism either. I believe everyone should be trained to become suspicious of anyone or anything that lacks wit, humour.

How do you see the trends in poetry developing in this country over the next decade or so?

I'll do what businessmen do; I'll forecast trends on the basis of research. What's now apparent? What are the forces? The forces are: grants, respectability, outlets, and what I am afraid of is that this may lead inevitably to a great mediocrity. That you're going to get a lot of birds singing but you're not going to get a rare bird anymore like A. M. Klein, or even say an Al Purdy; someone who towers because of either an eccentricity or a peculiar, if distorted, direction that his genius takes. This is what I think is happening not only in Canada but in the United States of America or England. One has only to realize that there are no Frosts, there are no Hart Cranes; where is your W. B. Yeats, your Pasternak? These are giants. And I don't think it's only distance—that we're looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope so that they seem bigger than they are. They were giants, and I don't see giants, I don't see even little giants, not yet. Of course one could say, that well when Yeats first appeared he didn't look like a giant either, or Hart Crane, and of course that's a point. But I read a great number of manuscripts, and I don't see that kind of either violence or lust, or indignation appearing that generally heralds your crazy, eccentric, madman who's going to be your important poet. I don't see that identification between the criminal and the artist. I like to think of the poet as something of a crook, certainly a knave, a rogue, a criminal, an outsider. Maybe by accepting the poet as we have we've embraced him and really given him the kiss of death. Maybe that's a bad thing to do with poets. Maybe they should always be allowed to grow up to be the wonderful, visionary, and beneficial misfits that they have been in the past. Certainly the past 150 years.

You once said that women's poetry in Canada is nothing more than the whines that accompany menstruation, and it is evident from your work that you believe there is something hormonal in women that prevents them from the creativity you attribute to males. On what evidence do you base such an opinion?

Well the evidence is for one thing that women have never come up with the great poets of the stature of a Milton, or a Homer, or a Dante, and a Shakespeare and I can go on rattling off some other names to show my prejudice or my erudition. I don't think that women's creativity lies in the field of art, except to a limited degree. Theirs is a biological creativity and I realize that I am making the classic male chauvinist remark. But the women artists that have achieved fame and greatness have done so in a very limited way, whether it's a Colette, or a Gertrude Stein, or an Emily Dickinson, or in our own time, Doris Lessing: if you examine their work, what strikes me anyway—it may not strike anyone else—is the limited nature of their achievement and within that limitation, of course, it is important. But I have the feeling that they will never give us a kind of all comprehending, all embracing achievement that we have so far had from the great male artists. It may be due to cultural factors and not biological factors. But if I'm pinned down I have to say that I belong with those who believe that there are inherited physiological, biological, hormonal differences between the male and female and that the female's achievement is of a different kind, no less great, no less important, but it's of a different kind from that of the male's.

In a recent article in Toronto Life you made a very interesting observation: “one's image is like a poem. You start an image as you start a poem, in full control … But as the poem or image develops something happens … The creator suddenly finds himself the victim of the poem. It is the same with the image every public man creates.” Irving, how much of your direction as an artist has been dictated by the public image you've had hurled back at you by the media and populace?

It's not so much the image that society had of me that gave a direction to my poetry, as much as the tension, or discussion or debate that went on between me and my public in Canada. That is to say the image that society had of me as a lecher never in anyway influenced my writing. Or the image that Canadians have had of me in any way, did not influence or change my writing. But what did happen was, because of the image they had of me, I entered into a kind of dialectic with that society, either to remove that image, or change that image, or to laugh at that image, or to expose that image, or any of these things. In other words, I had to take into account that there was this image that they had of me, which I might find laughable, or grotesque, or ridiculous, or amusing, or sad, but because it was there it was saying something to me about Canada. It was their poem that they were writing, I read the lines. I interpreted those lines. And I said to myself, this must be a particular kind of society to create this particular poem, ah! let me look at it, I must analyse it. And I would analyse it and I did analyse it, even as I analyse a poem by Shakespeare or John Milton or one of my own poems. You inspect this image, this poem, and it says something to you. You either accept it or reject it or you deal with it in one way or another. So it's that kind of influence. It is an influence at second remove you might say.

You're being very objective about it. Has it had no effect on your life in anyway whatsoever, other than it has led you to analyse it, and led you to think more carefully about Canadian society?

Well it's given me some of my happiest hours of merriment. It has certainly had a great effect. It's made life particularly enjoyable for me in this country and that is one of the reasons why I have never thought of leaving this country. Where could I get anything as asinine as this picture of myself as a rampaging, lustful, lecher walking down the corridors and pouncing at every girl that came within five yards of me or any of the other images that Canadians have had? It's provided me with many, many hours of pleasure, of amusement and certainly of reflection as I said a moment ago.

Is the poet who gets in trouble one who takes this image seriously?

If he's too much concerned with the image that society has of him he can get in trouble. As I've said on other occasions and in that article in Toronto Life, poets developed an image of themselves as Bohemians, as drunkards, as womanizers and so on. An unflattering image really by way of contrast to the respectable bourgeois. It was a defence. It was a defence of strategy. Eventually, of course, the image became a self-fulfilling prophecy and in that way it destroyed writers like A. M. Klein or Delmore Schwartz or John Berryman or Hart Crane and I can go on and list a number of other poets who have come to a sad end. They are destroyed because they accept society's valuation of their own role and function. Well, for myself, I was very lucky because I had a brother-in-law by the name of Strul Goldberg who made a million. He was crass, miserly, grotesque, one of these bloated figures of the bourgeois, who was so immediately repulsive, that thereafter I've had nothing but a seething contempt for people who make money their one goal in life. Therefore, I was never captivated by the ethos, the values of this capitalistic society, or this materialistic society. I always had other values given to me by my father, who was a scholar and a recluse and who made me feel, though he said very few words to me when he was alive, but who did make me feel that there was another world that was inviolable and much more beautiful. And this has been implanted in my soul ever since I was a child of five. So I never had the problems that a Klein had, or a John Berryman, or a Hart Crane, or any of the poets in North America. I've been saved from that particular tension. I've always had a feeling of superiority to the society in which I lived and nothing that I experienced in my life ever convinced me that I was wrong in holding this position of superiority. In fact everything that has happened in my life only went on to confirm my sense of self-superiority.

So this is the image that we get—of Layton being a strong, successful man, the poet as warrior, perhaps an aspiring ubermensch. Is there no self-destructive side to Irving Layton? Are we being fooled by some persona that he's laying upon us?

I don't think there's a person in the world who hasn't got a self-destructive side in him. Whether he be a poet or he be a shoe salesman, or an automobile mechanic. To be human is to have this element of masochism or self-destruction. In other words, this self-destruct thing exists in everyone of us and it's time to go off. It's time to go off when we die. After all that's what death is, it's this self-destruct mechanism that was implanted in one when one was in the mother's womb. But I would say that my motto has been, “BE STRONG”. Be strong and be joyous. I said it in a poem many years ago that I wrote for my son. And I've taken that as my goal—to be strong and to be joyful. I cannot say that I've always lived up to it, but certainly this is my philosophy.

Does this philosophy make you a unique poet living in the modern world?

In the sense that I have not tolerated or wanted whimpering or whining which has been popular with poets. The self-pity that you get in a Shelley and from time to time in Keats and in other afflicted poets who have lived in this bourgeois era. I can understand their self-pity and I sympathize with it, but for myself I have never found it a reasonable or heroic way of living.

George Woodcock once wrote, “When Layton forgets to argue, when he lets his fancy go … we get his best work”. Do you feel in your most recent poetry there's been more of the arguing for the advancement of your religious message at the expense perhaps of fancy, of aesthetics?

No I don't think so. I think in my most recent work I have made an interesting and for me original combination of argument and poetry. It's a different thing to do. It's really a tightrope and I'm only too well aware of it. One can become terribly didactic, too obvious, and ruin the poem by in effect putting one's finger in the reader's eye. I think my best poems in The Covenant and in For My Brother Jesus, avoid that sort of thing. I say my “best” poems. You can't always pull the trick off. You can't always maintain your balance on that particular tightrope, but I'm trying to do it. I'm trying to do something that other poets have not always been very successful at doing and I ought to be given good marks for trying even in my failures. But in poems where I succeed, as in “The Luminous Bagel” or “On Seeing An Old Man Praying in the Duomo,” or in the poem, “For My Brother Jesus,” or that very beautiful poem on the Jewish cemetery that I saw in Barcelona, “Parque De Montjuich,” I think I have done things there that I did not do before and that I do not see many other poets either achieving or even attempting to achieve. With these poems, I attempt to say something strongly, directly, as energetically and as imaginatively as I can. I don't think that I have dried up the sources of fantasy and imagination. I'm using fantasy and imagination truthfully in the service of truth.

Which poets in the past would you say your recent poetics are most akin to?

Well there are some of the poems that Yeats wrote. The poems dealing with the problem of Irish independence, where he was trying to do what I have done. Notice the distinction.

I noticed.

Some of Pound, some of the things in the Cantos; poems like Personae. And of course, D. H. Lawrence.

How about Rudyard Kipling?

Well, now that you've mentioned Rudyard Kipling, I must own that I've always had a rather fond, fondness for him. I think he's an undervalued poet, chiefly because people like T. S. Eliot and others came along, but I think he's done a number of very fine poems that deserve being read and reread.

When you read critics on Kipling there seems to be this attitude that he might have been a good poet had he not concerned himself with political issues and I think that this is part of what's happening with critics when they treat your work now.

Well that's part of the gentile tradition all along, you see. It's part of the pseudo-romantic tradition that has obtained in this country for so many decades. That the poet is not to say anything really, that he is to depict sunsets and lovely landscapes, rivers and lakes, and to concern himself with daffodils. That's part of the romantic tradition. The imagery might be different in our own time but in effect—be descriptive, be narrative, be lyrical, be lush if you wish but don't be argumentative and don't say anything to shock people and to make them aware of injustice and poverty or whatever. That's a tradition which has maintained itself for a very long time and you come up against it again and again. I came up against it as I mentioned earlier, thirty years ago when I first pointed out certain things about the repressiveness of Canadian society. And in effect I was told to shutup and to do what Carman had done or Lampman and talk about snow, or talk about swans, or marshes, or discover some species of bird that I was particularly fond of. Well I'm not an Ornithologist and birds haven't particularly appealled to me. I have in my time, as you know, written about frogs and squirrels, but that's as far as I could go. In effect what these people are telling me is to get back to the frogs and listen once again to their delightful croaking and depict them. Well, all in good season. For now I want to say things that strike me as having to be said and it's that kind of urgency that I believe makes the poet. It made Shelley, it made Byron, it made even Keats; an urgency to say something, to reveal something, to one's fellow man, and it's for this reason that I've said that poets are prophets and the descendants of prophets. Because their job is to probe and explore and to say things that are not delightful and that are unfamiliar. Your minor poet is concerned with beauty; your major poet is concerned with something else in addition to beauty—truth. And when he achieves a combination of beauty and truth, then he becomes the significant Shakespeare or Dante or John Milton or Wordsworth.

What is Irving Layton's personal vision of the Messiah? Maybe I should first ask—does Irving Layton consider himself the Messiah?

Well I have good grounds for considering myself a Messiah because I was born circumscised and I'm the only Jew after Moses to have been so favored with a messianic sign. But I have to put a limit to my vanity. It is sufficient that I consider myself a great poet without going so far as to consider myself the Messiah. In a sense, of course, every great poet is a Messiah. I think all people who write, who paint, who compose music are part of the Messiah. Why should we think of one Messiah? Why not think of the Messiah as this collective figure, really; that all poets, all painters, all musicians and composers have contributed towards making, and that the messianic dispensation is nothing else but that all of mankind becomes a part of this tremendous opposition to mere gravity, mere soil? That is, an affirmation of the spirit; the spirit taking the form of beauty, and color and creativity and truth and all the other things that the human animal, and only the human animal, has exhibited. The capacity for love, the capacity for creativity, the need for freedom, the claims of dignity. No other animal exhibits these thrusts, or assertions or qualities. So for me that's what the messianic dispensation is all about. All of us are striving to become a part of the Messiah. And we all have a part in this Messianiship,—all of us, all human beings on this planet—even Hitler.

How do you include Hitler?

Hitler was a human being who in his own personal life would exhibit a fondness for children, or for his friends. He exhibited loyalty, great courage. He had certain qualities that certainly were admirable qualities. They were used for diabolical ends and he was of course a madman, but these specific qualities of loyalty or devotion or courage, I consider great human qualities. The terrible thing, you see, is that the devil himself can exhibit these, and Milton knew it when he raised the powerful antagonist against God and made him the most significant figure in his Paradise Lost. The devil, after all, is the hero of Paradise Lost: not God. And he endowed the devil with this great quality: that he will serve no one. There's your first individualist. The affirmation of the individual, the rebelliousness. That is the quality you find even in a Hitler.