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By Adam Kirsch

If a text can mean anything the reader wants it to mean, then why read it in the first place?

Image Adam Kirsch Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

No book could announce its author’s intentions more plainly than “Paradise Lost.” John Milton declared his purpose in the opening stanza: “That to the heighth of this great argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.” And that is how “Paradise Lost” was read for the first century and a half of its existence: as a vindication of God’s justice. Because the sacred drama of the Fall will conclude with the salvation of humanity through the sacrifice of Jesus, Adam comes to realize that all his suffering is divinely ordained for the best: “O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good!”

Then, in the late 18th century, something changed. Readers like William Blake and Percy Shelley opened the same poem that pious Christians had been enjoying for generations, only they discovered something surprising: The hero of the poem is not Adam, or Jesus, or God himself, but actually Satan, the incarnation of evil. Because all the other characters act out of obedience to a divine plan, they can’t be said to possess the characteristics of heroism — boldness, daring, pride. Only Satan, who acts in opposition to God, has those traits, and as a result, he gets the best speeches — as when he declares, after he is hurled into hell, that “All is not lost; the unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield.”

That is why, to Shelley, “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is . . . far superior to his God.” Yet how could it be that Milton, who was a deeply pious Christian and who explicitly said that his poem was meant to promulgate Christian truths, was actually, as Blake said, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”? This could be possible only if the author was not actually the master of his own intentions. Perhaps Milton was ensnared by the false piety of his own time, and it took the antinomian insight of the Romantics to liberate him — to make him the poet of revolt that he secretly wanted to be all the time. Or perhaps the Romantics were simply imagining Milton as they wanted him to be. Either way, they permanently changed the way later readers would approach Milton’s epic; in a sense, they rewrote “Paradise Lost.”

The idea that readers could know an author’s intentions better than she does herself is, of course, deeply destabilizing to our usual ways of thinking about literature. If a text can mean anything the reader wants it to mean, then why read it in the first place? Isn’t literature supposed to help us achieve contact with other minds, rather than trapping us in a hall of mirrors, in which we can see only our own distorted reflections? Surely there must be limits to a text’s ­interpretability.

And of course there are — no one could finish “Paradise Lost” and claim that Satan was a minor character. Any reading of a book must read the book that actually exists. But the history of literature shows that, in practice, what an author believed she was doing in her work has no real sovereignty over later readers’ interpretations. Indeed, one way of defining great literature is that it allows itself to be endlessly reinterpreted: Hamlet can be a conscience-stricken intellectual for one reader, a victim of the Oedipus complex for another, without the two readings canceling each other out.

What Shakespeare himself thought about Hamlet is unknowable, and really it doesn’t matter; the words on the page constitute his final statement. The “Hamlet” we read today is richer than the play Shakespeare first produced by precisely the amount and variety of interpretation it has provoked in the interim. Great works of literature are like stars; they stay put, even as we draw them into new constellations.

Adam Kirsch is a columnist for Tablet. He is the author of two collections of poetry and several other books, including, most recently, “Why Trilling Matters.” In 2010, he won the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.