Chapter 2 establishes an intermedial, transatlantic connection between John Milton, Herman Melville and J. M. W. Turner. Building on the work of Erik Gray and Robert K. Wallace, it identifies in Melville’s and Turner’s work a shared investment in Miltonic ‘passive power’. This concept is spatially rendered in the work of all three figures as a vortex: a dynamic form with a still, potent centre. In Milton, vortical passive power is depicted most clearly in Satan circling the immovable Christ in Paradise Regained. Melville’s engagement with Miltonic passivity is evidenced in his annotated reading of Milton and given vortical form in the violent silence of the white whale in Moby-Dick and in the maddening refusals of Bartleby in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’. In Moby-Dick, Melville’s ekphrastic engagement with Milton’s sublime chaos also draws on the visual language of Turner’s paintings, in turn informed by Milton. The chapter ends by examining Turner’s self-mythologising anecdotes, arguing that he constructs himself as a Miltonic figure, positioned as the still, commanding centre of the elemental vortex.