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Analysis of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 12, 2020 • ( 0 )

Paradise Lost is a poetic rewriting of the book of Genesis. It tells the story of the fall of Satan and his compatriots, the creation of man, and, most significantly, of man’s act of disobedience and its consequences: paradise was lost for us. It is a literary text that goes beyond the traditional limitations of literary story telling, because for the Christian reader and for the predominant ethos of Western thinking and culture it involved the original story, the exploration of everything that man would subsequently be and do. Two questions arise from this and these have attended interpretations of the poem since its publication in 1667. First, to what extent did Milton diverge from orthodox perceptions of Genesis? Second, how did his own experiences, feelings, allegiances, prejudices and disappointments, play some part in the writing of the poem and, in respect of this, in what ways does it reflect the theological and political tensions of the seventeenth century?

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Paradise Lost was probably written between 1660–65, although there is evidence that Milton had had long term plans for a biblical epic: there are rough outlines for such a poem, thought to have been produced in the 1640s, in the Trinity MS, and Edward Phillips (1694:13) claims that Milton had during the same period shown him passages similar to parts of Book IV of the published work. The first edition (1667) was comprised of 10 books and its restructuring to 12 book occurred in the 1674 edition.

Prefatory material

There are two significant pieces of prefatory material; a 54-line poem by his friend Andrew Marvell (added in 1674) and Milton’s own prose note on ‘The Verse’ (added to the sixth issue of the 1667 first edition).

Marvell’s poem is largely a fulsome tribute to Milton’s achievement but this is interposed with cautiously framed questions which are thought to reflect the mood of awe and perplexity which surrounded Paradise Lost during the seven years between its publication and the addition of Marvell’s piece (lines 5–8, 11–12, 15–16).

Milton’s own note on ‘The Verse’ is a defence of his use of blank verse. Before the publication of Paradise Lost blank verse was regarded as occupying a middle ground between poetic and non-poetic language and suitable only for plays; with non-dramatic verse there had to be rhyme. Milton claims that his use of blank verse will overturn all of these presuppositions, that he has for the first time ever in English created the equivalent of the unrhymed forms of Homer’s and Virgil’s classical epics. He does not state exactly how he has achieved this and subsequent commentators (see particularly Prince 1954 and Emma 1964) have noted that while his use of the unrhymed iambic pentameter is largely orthodox he frames within it syntactic constructions that throughout the poem constitute a particular Miltonic style. In fact ‘The Verse’ is a relatively modest citation of what would be a change in the history of English poetry comparable with the invention of free verse at the beginning of the twentieth century. Effectively, Paradise Lost licensed blank verse as a non-dramatic form and without it James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), William Cowper’s The Task (1785) and William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey (1798) and The Prelude (1850) would not be the poems that they are.

The first twenty-six lines of Book I introduce the theme of the poem; ‘man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/Brought death into the world…’ (1–3) – and contain a number of intriguing statements. Milton claims to be pursuing ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ (16) which can be taken to mean an enterprise unprecedented in non-literary or literary writing. While theologians had debated the book of Genesis and poets and dramatists engaged with it, no-one had, as yet, rewritten it. This raises the complex question of Milton’s objectives in doing so. He calls upon ‘the heavenly muse’ to help him ‘assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men’ (25–6). Both of these statements carry immense implications, suggesting that he will offer a new perspective upon the indisputable truths of Christianity. The significance of this intensifies as we engage with the developing narrative of the poem.

In lines 27–83 Milton introduces the reader to Satan and his ‘horrid crew’, cast down into a recently constructed hell after their failed rebellion against God. For the rest of the book Milton shares his third person description with the voices of Satan, Beelzebub and other members of the defeated assembly.

The most important sections of the book are Satan’s speeches (82–124, 241–264 particularly). In the first he attempts to raise the mood of Beelzebub, his second in command, and displays a degree of heroic stoicism in defeat: ‘What though the field be lost?/All is not lost’ (105–6). His use of military images has caused critics, William Empson particularly, to compare him with a defeated general reviewing his options while refusing to disclose any notion of final submission or despair to his troops. By the second speech stubborn tenacity has evolved into composure and authority.

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least

We shall be free; the almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in hell: Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.

(I: 254–63)

While not altering the substance of Genesis, Milton’s style would remind contemporary readers of more recent texts. Henry V addressing his troops, Mark Antony stirring the passions of the crowd, even Richard III giving expression to his personal image of the political future, all exert the same command of the relation between circumstance,rhetoric and emotive effect. Milton’s Satan is a literary presence in his own right, an embodiment of linguistic energy. In his first speech he is inspired yet speculative but by the second the language is precise, relentless, certain: ‘The mind is its own place … We shall be free… We may reign secure ’. The arrogant symmetry of line 263 has turned it into an idiom, a cliché of stubborn resistance: ‘Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven’. The question raised here is why Milton chose to begin his Christian epic with a heroic presentation of Satan.

The most striking and perplexing element of Book I is the fissure opened between Milton’s presence as guide and co-ordinator in the narrative and our perception of the characters as self-determined figures. Consider, for example, his third-person interjection between Satan’s first speech and Beelzebub’s reply:

So spake the apostate angel, though in pain, Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair.

Milton is not telling anyone familiar with the biblical account anything they do not already know, but he seems to find it necessary to restrain them, to draw them backs lightly from the mood of admiration that Satan’s speeches create. When he gives an itemised account of the devils, he begins with Moloch.

First Moloch, horrid king besmeared with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents tears.

This version of Moloch is accurate enough but Milton is being a little imaginative with chronology, given that at this point in the history of the cosmos children, parents and the blood of human sacrifice did not yet exist. Indeed, his whole account of the sordid tastes and activities of the devils is updated to give emphasis to their effects upon humanity.Again, we have cause to suspect that Milton is attempting to match the reader’s impulse to sympathise with the heroic (in Satan’s case almost charismatic) condition of the devils with a more orthodox presentation of them as a threat to human kind, moral, physical and spiritual. Later (777–92) he employs a mock heroic style and presents them as pygmies, shrunk to a physical status that mirrors their spiritual decadence. Here it could be argued that he is attempting to forestall the reader’s admiration of the efforts and skill in the building of Pandemonium (710–92) by ridiculing the builders.

In Book I Milton initiates a tension, a dynamic that will attend the entire poem, between the reader’s purely literary response and our knowledge that the characters and their actions are ultimates, a foundation for all Christian perceptions of the human condition. The principal figures of Homer’s and Virgil’s poems are our original heroes. The classical hero will face apparently insurmountable tasks and challenges and his struggles against the complex balance of fate and circumstance will cause us to admire, to identify with him. Milton in Book I invoked the heroic, cast Satan and his followers as tragic, defeated soldiers, and at the same time reminded the Christian reader that it is dangerous to sympathise with these particular figures. Throughout the book we encounter an uncertainty that is unmatched in English literature: has the author unleashed feelings,inclinations within himself that he can only partially control, or is he in full control and cautiously manipulating the reader’s state of perplexity?

Book II is divided into two sections. The first (1–628) is the most important and consists of a debate in which members of the Satanic Host – principally Satan, Moloch, Belial, Mammon and Beelzebub – discuss the alternatives available to them. There are four major speeches. Moloch (50–105) argues for a continuation of the war with God. Belial (118–228) and Mammon (237–83) encourage a form of stoical resignation – they should make the best of that to which they have been condemned. It is Beelzebub (309–416) who raises the possibility of an assault upon Earth, Eden, God’s newest creation. Satan, significantly, stays in the background. He favours Beelzebub’s proposal, which eventually wins the consensual proxy, but he allows his compatriots freedom of debate,and it is this feature of the book – its evocation of open exchange – that makes it important in our perception of Paradise Lost as in part an allegory on contemporary politics. Milton’s attachment to the Parliamentarians during the Civil War, along with his role as senior civil servant to the Cromwellian cabinet, would have well attuned him to the fractious rhetoric of political discourse. Indeed, in the vast number of pamphlets he was commissioned to write in defence of the Parliamentarian and Republican causes, he was a participant, and we can find parallels between the speeches of the devils and Milton’s own emboldened, inspirational prose.

For example, one of Milton’s most famous tracts Eikonoklastes [38– 9], in which he seeks to justify the execution of Charles I, is often echoed in Moloch’s argument that they should resume direct conflict with God. Milton invokes the courageous soldiers who gave their lives in the Civil War ‘making glorious war against tyrants for the common liberty’ and condemns those who would protest against the killing of Charles ‘who hath offered at more cunning fetches to undermine our liberties, and put tyranny into an art, than any British king before him’. For Milton the Republicans embody ‘the old English fortitude and love of freedom’ ( CPW, III: 343–4). Similarly Moloch refers to those who bravely fought against God and now ‘stand in arms, and longing wait/The signal to ascend’ (55–6). Charles, the author of ‘tyranny’ in Milton’s pamphlet, shares this status with Moloch’s God; ‘the prison of his tyranny who reigns/By our delay …’ (59–60). Both Milton and Moloch continually raise the image of the defence of freedom against an autocratic tyrant.

Later in the book when Beelzebub is successfully arguing for an assault upon Earth he considers who would best serve their interests in this enterprise:

… Who shall tempt with wandering feet The dark unbottomed infinite abyss And through the palpable obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his airy flight Up borne with indefatigable wings Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive The happy isle; what strength, what art can then

Suffice, or what evasion bear him safe Through the strict sentries and stations thick Of angels watching round? … for on whom we send The weight of all our last hope relies.

(II: 404–16)

The heroic presence to whom Beelzebub refers is of course Satan, their leader. In Milton’s pamphlet A Second Defence of the English People (1654) he presents England as almost alone in Europe as the bastion of liberty and he elevates Cromwell to the position of heroic leader.

You alone remain. On you has fallen the whole burden of our affairs. On you alone they depend. In unison we acknowledge your unexcelled virtue … Such have been your achievements as the greatest and most illustrious citizen … Your deeds surpass all degrees, not only of admiration but surely of titles too, and like the tops of pyramids bury themselves in the sky, towering above the popular favour of titles. ( CPW , IV: 671–2)

The parallels between Beelzebub’s hyperbolic presentation of Satan and Milton’s of Cromwell are apparent enough. Even Milton’s subtle argument that Cromwell deserves a better status than that conferred by hereditary title echoes the devil’s desire to find their own replacement for the heavenly order, with Satan at its head. It is likely that many early readers of Paradise Lost would spot the similarities between the devils’ discourse and Milton’s, produced barely fifteen years before – which raises the question of what Milton was trying to do.

To properly address this we should compare the two halves of Book II. The first engages the seventeenth-century reader in a process of recognition and immediacy; the devils conduct themselves in a way that is remarkably similar to the political hierarchy of England in the 1650s. In the second, which describes Satan’s journey to Earth, the reader is shifted away from an identification with the devils to an abstract, metaphysical plane in which the protagonists become more symbolic than real. Satan is no longer human. At the Gates of Hell he meets Sin, born out of his head when the rebellion was planned, and Death, the offspring of their bizarre and inhuman coition (II: 666–967). Then he encounters Chaos, a presence and a condition conducive to his ultimate goal (II: 968–1009).

Book II is beautifully engineered. First, we are encouraged to identify with the fallen angels; their state and their heroic demeanour are very human. Then their leader, Satan, is projected beyond this and equated with ultimates, perversely embodied abstracts; Sin,Death and Chaos. One set of characters have to deal with uncertainties, unpredictable circumstances, conflicting states of mind. The others are irreducible absolutes.

Milton is establishing the predominant, in effect the necessary, mood of the poem. For much of it, up to the end of Book IX when the Fall occurs, the Christian reader is being projected into a realm that he/she cannot understand. This reader has inherited the consequences of the Fall, a detachment from any immediate identification with God’s innate character, motives and objectives. On the one hand our only point of comparison for the likes of Satan (and eventually God and his Son) is ourselves; hence Milton’s humanisation of the fallen angels. On the other, we should accept that such parallels are innately flawed; hence Milton’s transference of Satan into the sphere of ultimates, absolutes, metaphysical abstracts.

Critics have developed a variety of approaches to this conundrum. Among the modern commentators, C.S. Lewis read the poem as a kind of instructive guide to the self-evident complexities of Christian belief. Waldock (1947) and Empson (1961) conducted humanist readings in which Satan emerges as a more engaging character than God. Blake(followed by Coleridge and Shelley) was the first humanist interpreter, claiming that Milton was of the ‘Devil’s Party’ without being able to fully acknowledge his allegiance [137–8]. Christopher Hill (1977), a Marxist, is probably the most radical of the humanist critics and he argues that Milton uses the Satanic rebellion as a means of investigating his own ‘deeply divided personality’.

Satan, the battleground for Milton’s quarrel with himself, saw God as arbitrary power and nothing else. Against this he revolted: the Christian, Milton knew, must accept it. Yet how could a free and rational individual accept what God had done to his servants in England? On this reading, Milton expressed through Satan (of whom he disapproved) the dissatisfaction which he felt with the Father (whom intellectually he accepted). (366–7)

It begins with the most candid, personal passage of the entire poem, generally referred to as the ‘Address to Light’ (1–55). In this Milton reflects upon his own blindness. He had already done so in Sonnet XVI. Before that, and before his visual impairment, he had in‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ considered the spiritual and perceptual consequences of, respectively, light and darkness. Here all of the previous themes seem to find an apotheosis. He appears to treat his blindness as a beneficent, fatalistic occurrence which will enable him to achieve what few if any poets had previously attempted, a characterisation of God.

So much the rather thou celestial light Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight.

(III: 51–55)

Milton is not so much celebrating his blindness as treating it as a fitting correlative to a verbal enactment of ‘things invisible to mortal sight’, and by invisible he also means inconceivable.

God’s address (56–134) is to his Son, who will of course be assigned the role of man’s redeemer, and it involves principally God’s foreknowledge of man’s Fall. The following is its core passage.

So will fall He and his faithless Progeny: whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Such I created all the etherial powers And spirits, both them who stood and them who failed;

Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have given sincere Of true allegiance, constant faith or love, Where only what they needs must do, appeared, Not what they would? What praise could they receive?

What pleasure I from such obedience paid, When will and reason (reason also is choice) Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled, Made passive both, had served necessity, Not me.

(III: 95–111)

The address tells us nothing that we do not already know, but its style has drawn the attention of critics. In the passage quoted, and throughout the rest of it, figurative,expansive language is rigorously avoided; there is no metaphor. This is appropriate, given that rhetoric during the Renaissance was at once celebrated and tolerated as a reflection of the human condition; we invent figures and devices as substitutes for the forbidden realm of absolute, God-given truth. And God’s abjuration of figures will remind us of our guilty admiration for their use by the devils.

At the same time, however, the language used by an individual, however sparse and pure, will create an image of its user. God, it seems, is unsettled: ‘whose fault?/Whose but his own?’ He is aware that the Fall will occur, so why does he trouble himself with questions? And why, moreover, does God feel the need to explain himself, to apparently render himself excusable and blameless regarding events yet to occur: ‘Not me’. If Milton was attempting in his presentation of the devils to catch the reader between their faith and their empirical response, he appears to be doing so again with God. Critics have dealt with this problem in different ways. C.S. Lewis reminds the reader that this is a poem about religion but that it should not be allowed to disturb the convictions and certainties of Christian faith.

The cosmic story – the ultimate plot in which all other stories are episodes – is set before us. We are invited, for the time being, to look at it from the outside. And that is not, in itself, a religious experience … In the religious life man faces God and God faces man. But in the epic it is feigned for the moment, that we, as readers, can step aside and see the faces of God and man in profile.

Lewis’s reader, the collective ‘we’, is an ahistorical entity, but a more recent critic, Stanley Fish (1967) has looked more closely at how Milton’s contemporaries would have interpreted the passage. They, he argued, by virtue of the power of seventeenth-century religious belief, would not be troubled even by the possibility that Milton’s God might seem a little too much like us. William Empson (1961) contends that the characterisations of God and Satan were, if not a deliberate anticipation of agnostic doubt, then a genuine reflection of Milton’s troubled state of mind; ‘the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions’ (p.13).

Such critical controversies as this will be dealt with in detail in Part 3, but they should be borne in mind here as an indication of Paradise Lost’s ability to cause even the most learned and sophisticated of readers to interpret it differently. Lewis argues that Milton would not have wanted his Christian readers to doubt their faith (though he acknowledges that they might, implying that Milton intended the poem as a test), while Fish contends that querulous, fugitive interpretations are a consequence of modern, post-eighteenth-century, states of mind (a strategy generally known of Reader-Response Criticism). Empson, who treats the poem as symptomatic of Milton’s own uncertainties, is regarded by Fish as an example of the modern reader.

The first half of the Book (1–415) comprises God’s exchange with the Son and includes their discussion of what will happen after the Fall, anticipating the New Testament and Christ’s heroic role as the redeemer. The rest (416–743) returns us to Satan’s journey to Earth, during which he meets Oriel, the Sun Spirit, disguises himself and asks directions to God’s newest creation which, he claims, he wishes to witness and admire. By the end of the Book he has reached Earth.

Here the reader is engaged in two perspectives. We are shown Adam and Eve conversing,praying and (elliptically described) making love, and this vision of Edenic bliss is juxtaposed with the arrival and the thoughts of Satan. Adam’s opening speech (411–39) and Eve’s reply (440–91) establish the roles and characteristics that for both of them will be maintained throughout the poem. Adam, created first, is the relatively experienced,wise figure of authority who explains their status in Paradise and the single rule of obedience and loyalty. Eve, in her account of her first moments of existence, discloses aless certain, perhaps impulsive, command of events and impressions.

That day I oft remember, when from sleep I first awaked, and found myself reposed Under a shade of flowers, much wondering where And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.

Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound Of waters issued from a cave and spread Into a liquid plain, then stood unmoved Pure as the expanse of heaven; I thither went With unexperienced thought, and laid me down On the green bank, to look into the clear Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky. As I bent down to look just opposite A shape within the watery gleam appeared Bending to look on me; I started back, It started back, but pleased I soon returned, Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks Of sympathy and love; there I had fixed Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire, Had not a voice thus warned me, What thou seest,

What there thou seest fair creature is thyself, With thee it came and goes: but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow stays They coming, and thy soft embraces, he Whose image thou art, him thou shall enjoy Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear Multitudes like thyself, and then be called Mother of human race: what could I do, But follow straight, invisibly thus led? Till I espied thee.

(IV: 449–77)

This passage is frequently cited in feminist surveys of Milton [166– 74]. It introduces his most important female figure, indeed the original woman, and it does so by enablingher to disclose her innate temperamental and intellectual characteristics through her useof language.

We do not require textual notes or critical commentaries to tell us that Eve’s attraction to her own image in the water (460–5) is a straight-forward, indeed candid, disclosure of narcissism. Her first memory is of vain self-obsession. However, before we cite this as evidence of Milton’s portrayal of Eve, who will eat the forbidden fruit first, as by virtue of her gender the prototypical cause of the Fall, we should look more closely at the stylistic complexities of her speech.

For example, when she tells of how she looked ‘into the clear/Smooth lake’ (458–9) she is performing a subtle balancing act between hesitation and a more confident command of her account. ‘Clear’ in seventeenth-century usage could be both a substantive reference to clarity of vision (‘ the clear’) and be used in its more conventional adjectival sense (‘clear smooth lake’). Similarly with ‘no shadow stays/Thy coming’ (470–1), the implied pause after ‘stays’ could suggest it first as meaning ‘prevents’ and then in its less familiar sense of ‘awaits’. The impression we get is confusing. Is she tentatively feeling her way through the traps and complexities of grammar, as would befit her ingenuous, unsophisticated state as someone recently introduced to language and perception? Or is Milton urging us to perceive her as, from her earliest moments, a rather cunning actress and natural rhetorician, someone who canuse language as a means of presenting herself as touchingly naïve and blameless in her instincts? In short, is her language a transparent reflection of her character or a means by which she creates a persona for herself?

This question has inevitably featured in feminist readings of the poem [168–9], because it involves the broader issue of whether or not Milton was creating in Adam and Eve the ultimate and fundamental gender stereotypes – their acts were after all responsible for the postlapsarian condition of humankind.

To return to the poem itself we should note that it is not only the reader who is forming perceptions of Adam and Eve. Satan, in reptilian disguise, is watching and listening too.Beginning at line 505, Milton has him disclose his thoughts.

all is not theirs it seems: One fatal tree there stands of knowledge called,

Forbidden them to taste: knowledge forbidden?

Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord Envy them that? Can it be sin to know, Can it be death? And do they only stand By ignorance, is that their happy state, The proof of their obedience and their faith? O fair foundation laid whereon to build Their ruin! Hence I will excite their minds With more desire to know …

(IV: 513–24)

Without actually causing us to question the accepted facts regarding Satan’s malicious, destructive intent Milton again prompts the reader to empathise with his thoughts – and speculations. Satan touches upon issues that would strike deeply into the mindset of the sophisticated Renaissance reader. Can there, should there, be limits to human knowledge?By asking questions about God’s will and His design of the universe do we overreach ourselves? More significantly, was the original act of overreaching and its consequences– the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge as an aspiration to knowledge –intended by God as a warning?

The rest of the book returns us to the less contentious, if no less thrilling, details of the narrative, with Uriel warning the angel Gabriel of Satan’s apparent plot, Gabriel assigning two protecting angels to Adam and Eve, without their knowledge, and Gabriel himself confronting Satan and telling him that he is contesting powers greater than himself.

Before moving further into the poem let us consider whether the various issues raised so far in the narrative correspond with what we know of Milton the thinker and not simply our projected notion of the thoughts which underlie his writing of the poem. Most significantly, all of the principal figures – Satan, God, Adam and Eve – have been caused to affect us in ways that we would associate as much with literary characterisation as with their functions within religious belief; they have been variously humanised. In one of Milton’s later prose tracts, De Doctrina Christiana , begun, it is assumed, only a few years before he started Paradise Lost, we encounter what could be regarded as the theological counterparts to the complex questions addressed in the poem. In a passage on predestination, one of the most contentious topics of the post-reformation debate, Milton is, to say the least, challenging:

Everyone agrees that man could have avoided falling. But if, because of God’s decree, man could not help but fall (and the two contradictory opinions are sometimes voiced by the same people), then God’s restoration of fallen man was a matter of justice not grace. For once it is granted that man fell, though not unwillingly, yet by necessity, it will always seem that necessity either prevailed upon his will by some secret influence, or else guided his will in some way. But if God foresaw that man would fall of his own accord, then there was no need for him to make a decree about the fall, but only about what would become of man who was going to fall. Since, then, God’s supreme wisdom foreknew that first man’s falling away, but did not decree it, it follows that, before the fall of man, predestination was not absolutely decreed either. Predestination, even after the fall, should always be considered and defined not so much the result of an actual decree but as arising from the immutable condition of a decree.

( CPW, VI: 174)

If after reading this you feel rather more perplexed and uncertain about our understanding of God and the Fall than you did before, you are not alone. It is like being led blindfold through a maze. You start with a feeling of relative certainty about where you are and what surrounds you, and you end the journey with a sense of having returned to this state,but you are slightly troubled about where you’ve been in the meantime. Can we wrest an argument or a straightforward message from this passage? It would seem that predestination (a long running theological crux of Protestantism) is, just like every other component of our conceptual universe, a result of the Fall. Thus, although God knew that man would fall, He did not cause (predetermine) the act of disobedience. As such, this is fairly orthodox theology, but in making his point Milton allows himself and his readers to stray into areas of paradox and doubt that seem to run against the overarching sense of certainty. For instance, he concedes that ‘it will always seem that necessity either prevailed upon his (man’s) will by some secret influence, or else guided his will in someway’. Milton admits here that man will never be able to prevent himself (‘it will always seem’) from wondering what actually caused Adam and Eve to eat the fruit. Was it fate,the influence of Satan, Adam’s or Eve’s own temperamental defects?

The passage certainly does not resolve the uncertainties encountered in the first four books, but it does present itself as a curious mirror-image of the poem. Just as in the poem the immutable doctrine of scripture sits uneasily with the disorientating complexities of literary writing, so our trust in theology will always be compromised by our urge to ask troubling questions. Considering these similarities it is possible to wonder if Milton decided to dramatise Genesis in order to throw into the foreground the very human tendencies of skepticism and self-doubt that exist only in the margins of conventionalreligious and philosophic thought. If so, why? As a form of personal catharsis, as an encoded manifesto for potential anti-Christianity, or as a means of revealing to readers the true depths of their uncertainties? All of these possibilities have been put forward by commentators on the poem, but as the following pages will show, the decision is finally yours.

Books V–VIII

These four books, the middle third of the poem, will be treated as a single unit because they are held together by a predominant theme; the presence of Raphael, sent by God to Paradise at the beginning of book V as Adam and Eve’s instructor and advisor. The books show us the growth of Adam and Eve, the development of their emotional and intellectual engagement with their appointed role prior to the most important moment in the poem’s narrative, their Fall in book IX. At the beginning of book V God again becomes a speaking presence, stating that he despatches Raphael to ‘render man inexcusable … Lest wilfully transgressing he pretend/Surprisal, unadmonished, unfore-warned’ (244–5). Line 244 offers a beautiful example of tactical ambiguity. Does ‘Lest’ refer to man’s act of ‘transgressing’? If so, we are caused again to consider the uneasy relation between free will, predestination and God’s state of omniscience: surely God knows that man will transgress. Or does ‘Lest’ relate, less problematically, to man’s potential reaction to the consequences of his act?Once more the reader is faced with the difficult choice between an acceptance of his limited knowledge of God’s state and the presentation to us here of God as a humanised literary character.

The arrival of Raphael (V: 308–576) brings with it a number of intriguing, often puzzling, issues. Food plays a significant part. Eve is busy preparing a meal for their first guest.

She turns, on hospitable thoughts intent What choice to choose for delicacy best, What order so contrived as not to mix Tastes, not well-joined, inelegant, but bring Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change.

This passage might seem to be an innocuous digression on the domestic bliss of the newlyweds – with Eve presented as a Restoration prototype for Mrs. Beaton or Delia Smith – but there are serious resonances. For one thing her hesitant, anxious state of mind appears to confirm the conventional, male, social and psychological model of ‘female’ behaviour – should we then be surprised that she will be the first to transgress, given her limitations? Also, the passage is a fitting preamble for Raphael’s first informal act of instruction. Milton sets the scene with, ‘A while discourse they hold;/No fear lest dinner cool’ (395–6), reminding us that fire would be part of the punishment for the Fall; before that neither food nor anything else needed to be heated. The ‘discourse’ itself, on Raphael’s part, treats food as a useful starting point for a mapping out of the chain of being. Raphael, as he demonstrates by his presence and his ability to eat, can shift between transubstantial states; being an angel he spends most of his time as pure spirit. At lines 493–9 he states that

Time may come when men With angels may participate, and find No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare; And from these corporal nutriments perhaps Your bodies may at last turn to spirit, Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend

Raphael will expand upon this crucial point throughout the four central books: it is God’s intention that man, presently part spirit, part substance, will gradually move up the chain of being and replace Satan’s fallen crew as the equivalent of the new band of angels. How exactly this will occur is not specified but Raphael here implies, without really explaining, that there is some mysterious causal relationship between such physical experiences as eating and the gradual transformation to an angelic, spiritual condition: his figurative language is puzzling. It would, however, strike a familiar chord for Eve, who atthe beginning of the book had described to Adam her strange dream about the forbidden fruit and an unidentified tempter who tells her to ‘Taste this, and be henceforth among the gods/Thyself a goddess, not to earth confined’ (V: 77–8). Later in Book IX, just before she eats the fruit, Satan plays upon this same curious equation between eating and spirituality, ‘And what are gods that man may not become/As they, participating godlike food?’ (IX: 716–17).

Milton appears to be sewing into the poem a fabric of clues for the attentive reader,clues that suggest some sort of causal, psychological explanation for the Fall. In this instance it might appear that Raphael’s well meant, but perhaps misleading, discourse creates for Eve just the right amount of intriguing possibilities to make her decision to eat the fruit almost inevitable. In consequence, God’s statement that Raphael’s role is to ‘render man inexcusable’ sounds a little optimistic.

Books VI–VIII are concerned almost exclusively with Raphael’s instructive exchanges with Adam; Eve, not always present, is kept informed of this by Adam during their own conversations. Book VI principally involves Raphael’s description of Satan’s revolt, the subsequent battles and God’s victory. Book VII deals mainly with the history of Creation and in Book VIII Raphael explains to Adam the state and dimensions of the Cosmos. The detail of all this is of relatively slight significance for an understanding of the poem itself.Much of it involves an orthodox account of the Old Testament story of Creation and the only notable feature is Milton’s decision in Book VIII to follow, via Raphael, the ancient theory of Ptolemy that the earth is the centre of the universe. Copernicus, the sixteenth-century astronomer, had countered this with the then controversial model of the earth revolving around the sun, which Raphael alludes to (without of course naming Copernicus) but largely discounts. Milton had met Galileo and certainly knew of his confirmation of the Copernican model. His choice to retain the Ptolemaic system for Paradise Lost was not alluded to in his ex cathedr awriting and was probably made fordramatic purposes; in terms of man’s fate the earth was indeed at the centre of things.

More significant than the empirical details of Raphael’s disclosures is Adam’s level of understanding. Constantly, Raphael interrupts his account and speaks with Adam about God’s gift of reason, the power of the intellect, which is the principal distinction between human beings and other earthbound, sentient creatures. At the end of Book VI Raphael relates reason (563–76) to free will (520–35). Adam is told (and the advice will be oft repeated) that their future will depend not upon some prearranged ‘destiny’ but upon their own decisions and actions, but that they should maintain a degree of caution regarding how much they are able, as yet, to fully comprehend of God’s design and intent. In short, their future will be of their own making while their understanding of the broader framework within which they must make decisions is limited and partial. At the end of Book VI, for example, after Raphael has provided a lengthy account of the war in heaven he informs Adam that he should not take this too literally. It has been an allegory, an extended metaphor, a ‘measuring [of] things in Heaven by things on Earth’. (893)

In Book VIII, before his description of the Cosmos, Raphael again reminds Adam that he is not capable of fully appreciating its vast complexity.

The great architect Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge, His secrets to be scanned by them who ought

Rather admire; or if they list to try Conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide

(VIII: 72–8)

This is frequently treated as an allusion to the ongoing debate on the validity of the Ptolemaic or the Copernican models of earth and the planets, but it also has a rhetorical function in sustaining a degree of tension between man’s gift of reason and the at once tantalising yet dangerous possibilities that might accompany its use. All of this carries significant, but by no means transparent, relevance from a number of theological issues with which Milton was involved; principally the Calvinist notion of predestination versus the Arminianist concept as free will as a determinant of fate [9–11].

Later in Book VIII (357–451) Adam tells Raphael of his first conversation with God just prior to the creation of Eve, which resembles a Socratic dialogue. Socrates, the Greek philosopher, engaged in a technique when instructing a pupil of not imposing a belief but sewing his discourse with enough speculations and possibilities to engage the pupil’s faculties of enquiry and reason. Through this exchange of questions and propositions they would move together toward a final, logically valid conclusion. God’s exchange with Adam follows this pattern. The following is a summary of it.

Adam laments his solitude. God says, well you’re not alone, you have other creatures,the angels and me. Yes, says Adam, but I want an equal partner. God replies: Considermy state. I don’t need a consort. Adam returns, most impressively, with the argument that God is a perfect self-sufficiency, but man must be complemented in order to multiply. Quite so, says God. This was my intention all along. And He creates Eve.

The relevance of this to Adam’s ongoing exchange with Raphael is unsettling. Stanley Fish suggests that it is meant to offer a further, tacit reminder to the reader of the rulesand preconditions that attend man’s pre-fallen state. ‘If the light of reason coincides with the word of God, well and good; if not reason must retire, and not fall into the presumption of denying or questioning what it cannot explain’ (1967:242). It reminded William Empson (1961) of the educational phenomenon of the Rule of Inverse Probability, where the student is less concerned with the attainment of absolute truth than with satisfying the expectations of the teacher: in short, Adam has used his gift of reason without really understanding what it is and to what it might lead. Is Adam being carefully and adequately prepared for the future (Fish) or is Raphael’s instruction presented to us as some kind of psychological explanation for the Fall (Empson)?

This interpretative difference underpins our reading of Books V– XII, and, to complicate matters further, indeed to heighten the dramatic tension of the narrative,Milton places Adam’s account of his exchange with God not too long before a similar conversation takes place between Eve and Satan, in Book IX just prior to her decision to eat the fruit.

Eve’s conversation with Satan (532–779) is the most important in the poem; it initiates the Fall of mankind. Satan’s speeches, particularly the second (678–733), display an impressive and logical deployment of fact and hypothesis. Eve does not understand the meaning of death, the threatened punishment for the eating of the fruit, and Satan explains:

ye shall not die: How should ye? By the fruit? It gives you life To knowledge. By the threatener? Look on me, Me who have touched and tasted, yet both live, And life more perfect have attained than fate Meant me, by venturing higher than my lot. Shall that be shut to man, which to the beast Is open?

(IX: 685–93)

Having raised the possibility that death is but a form of transformation beyond the merely physical, he delivers a very cunning follow-up.

So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off Human, to put on gods, death to be wished, Though threatened, which no worse than this can bring.

And what are gods that man may not become As they, participating godlike food?

(IX: 713–17)

In short, he suggests that the fruit, forbidden but for reasons yet obscure, might be the key to that which is promised.

Eve’s reply to Satan’s extensive, even-handed listing of the ethical and practical considerations of her decision is equally thoughtful. She raises a question, ‘In plain then, what forbids he but to know/Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? (758–9) and expands, ‘What fear I then, rather what know to fear/Under this ignorance of good and evil, /Of God or death, of law or penalty?’ Adam and Eve have continually been advised by Raphael of their state of relative ignorance while they have also been promised enlightenment. It is evident from Eve’s speech that she regards the rule of obedience as in some way part, as yet unspecified, of the existential puzzle which their own much promoted gift of reason will gradually enable them to untangle. They are aware that their observance of the rule is a token of their love and loyalty, but as Satan implies, such an edict is open to interpretation.

What can your knowledge hurt him, or this tree

Import against his will, if all be his? Or is it envy, and can envy dwell In heavenly breasts?

(IX: 726–30)

Eve’s exchange with Satan inevitably prompts the reader to recall Adam’s very recent account of his own with God and, indeed, his extended dialogue with Raphael. In each instance the human figure is naïve, far less informed than their interlocutor, while the latter both instructs and encourages his pupil to rationalise and speculate. (Eve is unaware of Satan’s identity. He is disguised as a serpent and is, for all she knows, another agent of wisdom.) These parallels can be interpreted differently and the archetypal difference is evident between Christian and humanist readers. Of the former, Lewis argued that the parallels were meant to be recognised but were intended by Milton as a kind of re-enactment of the poem itself: the Christian reader – and in Lewis’s view the poem was intended only for Christian readers – should perceive him/herself as a version of Adam and Eve and resist the temptation to overreach their perceptual and intellectual subservience to God’s wisdom. Lewis held that the poem’s moral of obedience and restraint has the ‘desolating clarity’ of what we are taught in the nursery. Children might be incapable of understanding the ethical and moral framework which underpins their parents’ rules and edicts but they should recognise that these apparently arbitrary regulations are a reflection of the latter’s protective love. Empson countered this as follows: ‘A father may reasonably impose a random prohibition to test the character of his children, but anyone would agree that he should then judge an act of disobedience in the light of its intention’ (1961:161). Empson perceives the exchanges, particularly between Satan and Eve, not only as mitigating factors in Milton’s particular account ofthe Fall but also as explanations of how the Fall was made inevitable by God himself.Both agree that the reader is prompted to question God’s omniscient planning and strategies, while Lewis sees this as a warning and reminder that blind faith should be ouronly proper response and Empson that doubt informs Milton’s own rendering of the story.

Eve does of course eat the fruit, and during lines 896–1016 she confronts Adam with her act. Adam’s response and his eventual decision to follow Eve are intriguing because while the misuse, or misunderstanding, of the gift of reason was the significant factor forher Adam is affected as much by emotional, instinctive registers.

I feel The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh, of my bone thou art, and from thy state

Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.

(IX: 913–16)

This is addressed ‘to himself’, and then to Eve he states that

So forcible within my heart I feel The bond of nature draw me to my own, My own in thee, for what thou art is mine; Our state cannot be severed; we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.

(IX: 955–9)

And the episode is summed up by Milton:

She gave him of that fair enticing fruit With liberal hand: he scrupled not to eat Against his better knowledge, not deceived,

But fondly overcome with female charm.

(IX: 996–9)

These passages raise questions about chronology and characterisation. We already know from Book VIII (607–17) that Adam appreciates that the love he feels for Eve (partly physical) partakes of his greater love for God (mutual and transcendent) and we might wonder why and how Adam seems able to move so rapidly to a state of almost obsessive physical bonding with her: ‘The link of nature’, ‘flesh of flesh’, ‘The bond of nature’, ‘My own in Thee’, ‘One flesh’. Moreover, during Milton’s description in Book IV of Adam and Eve’s innocent act of sexual liaison we were informed that the base, lust-fulfilling dimension of sex is a consequence of the Fall, and this is confirmed shortly after he too eats the fruit and they engage in acts ‘of amorous intent’ (IX: 1035). It seems odd, therefore, that Adam, still unfallen, seems to be persuaded to eat the fruit by the post-lapsarian instinct of pure physical desire.

One explanation of why Milton offers this puzzling, slightly inconsistent scenario could be implicit in his own rationale of Adam’s decision; ‘not deceived/But fondly overcome with female charm’ (998–9). From this it would seem that her explanation of the act of disobedience is of virtually no significance compared with the sub-rational power of attraction that she shares, or will share, with the rest of her gender.

Charges of misogyny against Milton go back as far as Samuel Johnson and are generally founded upon the biographical formula that the failure of his first marriage to Mary Powell was the motive for his divorce tracts and that these personal and ideological prejudices spilled over into his literary writing. Since the 1970s more sophisticated feminist critics have argued that the distinctive, archetypal roles played out by Adam and Eve are less a consequence of Milton’s personal state of mind and more part of a shared, patriarchal dialectic in which ongoing social conventions are justified and perpetuated through a mythology of religion and culture [166–74].

Here the narrative of the Fall is continued, with God observing the act of disobedience and sending the Son to pronounce judgement on Adam and Eve. The death sentence is deferred and they, and their offspring, are condemned to a limited tenure of earthly existence, much of it to be spent in thankless toil and sorrow (103–228). There then follows a lengthy section (228–720) in which Satan and his followers have their celebrations ruined by being turned into serpents and beset by unquenchable thirst and unassuagble appetite – so much for victory. The most important part is from 720 to the end of the book, during which Adam and Eve contemplate suicide. Adam considers this in an introspective soliloquy.

But say That death be not one stroke, as I supposed,

Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuity.

(X: 808–130)

Adam is aware that self-inflicted death will involve a perpetuation, not a completion, of his tortured condition. This realisation prompts the circling, downward spiral of his inconclusive thoughts, until Eve arrives. She readily accepts blame for their condition.Adam is eventually moved by her contrition and they comfort each other. Crucially, the factor that enables Adam to properly organise his own thoughts is Eve’s proposition that rather than kill themselves they should spare their offspring the consequences of their act and refuse to breed; ‘Childless thou art, childless remain’ (989). Adam points out that this would both further upset the God-given natural order of things and, most importantly, grant a final victory to Satan. He seems at last to be exercising his much promoted gift of reason in a manner that is concurrent with the will of God, which implies that reason is tempered by thoughtful restraint not through any form of enlightenment, but from punishment. This impression finds its theological counterpart in what is termed ‘The Paradox of the Fortunate Fall’. This notion was first considered in depth by St.Augustine, and A.O. Lovejoy (1945 and 1960) traces its history up to and including Paradise Lost . The Fall is both paradoxical and fortunate because in the latter case it wasa necessary stage in man’s journey toward wisdom and awareness, while in the former it reminds us that we should not continually question and investigate God’s will.

Again we are returned to the conflict between Christian and humanist readings of the poem. The Augustinian interpretation would be a reminder that we should not concern ourselves too much with the apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes sewn into the poem,while a humanist reading would raise the question of why Milton deliberately,provocatively accentuates such concerns.

At the end of the book (1041–96) we are offered the spectacle of Adam and Eve no longer pondering such absolutes as the will of God and the nature of the cosmos but concentrating on more practical matters, such as how they might protect themselves from the new and disagreeable climate by rubbing two sticks together. Is Milton implicitly sanctioning the Augustinian notion of investigative restraint or is he presenting the originators of humanity as embodiments of pathetic, pitiable defeat?

Books XI and XII

In these the angel Michael shows Adam a vision of the future, drawn mainly from the Old Testament but sometimes bearing a close resemblance to the condition of life in seventeenth-century England. Kenneth Muir (1955) argued that although the two closing books were essential to the scriptural scheme of the poem they are ‘poetically on a much lower level’. What he means is that there is no longer any need for Milton to generate dramatic or logical tension: the future, as disclosed by Michael, has already arrived.

Adam is particularly distressed by the vision of Cain and Abel (XI: 429–60), the ‘sight/Of terror, foul and ugly to behold/Horrid to think, how horrible to feel!’ (463–5). Michael has already explained how, by some form of genetic inheritance, Adam is responsible for this spectacle of brother murdering brother. And we should remind ourselves that many of the first readers of this account had memories of brothers, sons and fathers facing one another across English battlefields; indeed its author’s own brother was on the Royalist side.

These two are brethren, Adam, and to come

Out of thy loins; the unjust the just hath slain,

For envy that his brother’s offering found From heaven acceptance; but the bloody fact Will be avenged, and other’s faith approved.

(XI: 454–8)

The tragic consequences of a perpetual rivalry between two figures who believe that theirs is the better ‘offering’ to God might easily be regarded as a vision of the consequences of the Reformation. The specific description of war (638–81) pays allegiance to the Old Testament and Virgil but would certainly evoke memories of when Englishmen, barely a decade earlier,

Lay siege, encamped; by battery, scale and mine,

Assaulting; others from the wall defend With dart and javelin, stones and sulphurous fire;

On each hand slaughter and gigantic deeds.

(XI: 656–9)

One wonders if Milton’s own experience of the Civil War, the Cromwellian Commonwealth and the Restoration, when death and destruction were perpetuated by man’s perception of God’s will, was in his mind when he wrote these passages. Hill, the Marxist historian, (1977) is in no doubt that it was and he devotes a subsection to apolitical-historical decoding of Books XI and XII (380–90). Hill concludes that

They [the books] represent Milton’s attempt to be utterly realistic in facing the worst without despair. It seemed to be true that there was a cyclical return of evil after every good start … God’s people in England after 1660 must learn to escape from history as circular treadmill, must become free to choose the good, as the English people had failed to chose it during the Revolution. (386)

For Hill, Milton regarded the political swings and catastrophes of the previous three decades as a concentrated version of man’s perpetual struggle and continual failure to build something better from his fallen condition. Moreover, Hill argues that the essential parallel between Adam’s vision of the future and Milton’s own of the recent past was that Milton perceived both as part of an extended process of man’s ‘reeducation and ultimate recognition of God’s purposes.’ (387) In short, the Cromwellian Revolution failed because man was not yet able to fully comprehend and engage with the legacy of the Fall.

Alongside the particulars of war and destruction Adam is shown more general, but no less distressing, pictures of the human condition. After enquiring of Michael if there arenot better ways to die than in battle Adam is presented with the following.

A lazar house it seemed, wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased, all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide wasting pestilence, Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint racking rheums.

Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair Tended the sick busiest from couch to couch; And over them triumphant death his dart Shook, but delayed to strike, though oft invoked With vows, as their chief good, and final hope.

(XI: 479–93)

Disease, disablement, terminal illness and much pain will be inescapable and the onlymeans by which their worst effects might be moderated is through abstinence andrestraint: the pursuit of sensual pleasure brings its own form of physical punishment. Justprior to disclosing the ‘lazar house’ to Adam Michael informs him that he is doing so ‘that thou mayst know/What misery the inabstinence of Eve/ Shall bring on men’ (475–7) and yet again the reader feels a puzzling engagement with narrative chronology. At no point in Eve’s book IX exchange with Satan does she even inadvertently disclose that hedonism plays some part in her desire to eat the fruit, but Michael clearly presents acausal relation between what she did and the self destructive in abstinence of man’s fallen state. During his conversations with Raphael, before the Fall, Adam might well have enquired about such apparent discontinuities, but not now because as becomes evident in Book XII Michael’s instructive regimen is informed by, and apparently achieves, a different purpose.

Most of Book XII charts a tour of the Old and parts of the New Testament – Noah, The Flood, the Tower of Babel, the journey to the Promised Land and the coming of Christ –but its most important sections are towards the end when Adam is given the opportunityto reflect on what he has seen.

How soon hath thy prediction, seer blest, Measured this transcient world, the race of time,

Till time stand fixed: beyond is all abyss, Eternity, whose end no eye can reach. Greatly instructed I shall hence depart, Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill Of knowledge, what this vessel can contain; Beyond which was my folly to aspire. Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best, And love with fear the only God, to walk As in his presence, ever to observe His providence, and on him sole depend.

(XII: 553–64)

Michael answers, approvingly:

This having learned, thou hast attained the sum

Of wisdom; hope no higher.

(XII: 575–6)

Without actually comparing his experiences with Michael with those before the Fall Adam is clearly aware that the cause of the Fall was his inclination to ‘aspire’ to an over-ambitious, extended state of ‘knowledge’. One significant difference between Raphael’s and Michael’s methods of instruction is that while the former operated almost exclusively within the medium of language, the principal instrument of speculation and enquiry, the latter relies more upon empirical and tangible evidence, pictures. This is appropriate,given that Michael’s intention is to present Adam with indisputable, ineluctable facts, matters not open to debate, and in doing so to reinforce the lesson that ‘wisdom’ has its limits; ‘hope no higher’. The question that has attended practically all of the critical debates on the poem is encapsulated in three lines at the centre of Adam’s speech.

Greatly instructed I shall hence depart, Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill Of knowledge.

(XII: 537–9)

The question is this: does Adam speak for the reader? And there are questions within the question. Did Milton intend the reader to share Adam’s state of intellectual subordination to a mindset ‘beyond which was [his] folly to aspire’? Are the tantalising complexities of the poem – the presentations of God and Satan, the intricate moral and theological problems raised in the narrative – designed to tempt the reader much as Adam had been tempted, and to remind us of the consequences? Or did Milton himself face uncertainties and did he use the poem not so much to resolve as to confront them? As Part III will show, these matters, after 300 years of often perplexed commentary and debate, remain unsettled.

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Ambition in "The Duchess of Malfi" and "Paradise Lost"

“Ambition is a great man’s madness, madam.” Compare and contrast the two texts in light of this statement.

To some respect, both Milton and Webster present their characters with certain motives of ambition. Milton once said “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make heaven of hell, a hell of heaven .” highlighting that ambition is an internal cause, simply a human flaw and cannot be ignored and can cause tragedy in some respect to what is good or perhaps manipulate the way of thinking in men. In Paradise Lost, Milton shows us that ambition is the cause of madness and self-torment through his portrayal of Satan and how ambition has ruined this archangel – “But his doom reserved him more wrath; for now the though both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him” emphasises the way in which Satan’s greed for power has caused him to realise what he has lost and how he longs to regain his place alongside God with equal power, “he trusted to have equalled the most high”. Similarly in The Duchess of Malfi, Webster emphasises that ambition is the cause of your own downfall; leading to corruption and death. “Ambition is a great man’s madness, madam” highlights that ambition in itself is a form of madness. It shows that ambition is a personal power which if not controlled can cause the manipulation of the mind, a lasting torment as a “man’s madness” which will not tire.

Milton begins his epic poem by emphasising the extreme power of the creator, God as describing the “Heavens and the Earth rose out of chaos”; not moulded from unformed matter, but from nothing. He describes his own personal ambition, to “invoke the aid to my adventurous song, while it pursues things unattempted; yet in prose or rhyme and justify the ways of God to men.”

Indeed, it his Lucifer’s personal greed for power which causes the archangel to fall and be banished to Hell for his attempt to overthrow the monarchy of God. “He trusted to have equalled the most high, if he opposed; and with ambitious aim against the throne and monarchy of God” highlights the ambition of Lucifer to gain equal power to that of God, which has caused his downfall to be banished into the depths of Hell. It stresses that Lucifer’s personal desires is the cause of his own torment.

Similarly, the description of Bosola – “Indeed, he rails at the things which he wants” shows that ambitious desire is in its own right a curse on the human mind. Webster’s powerful imagery stresses the strong use of adjectives, “rails” to emphasise the intricate nature of a natural emotion which causes our own heavy downfall. The term “he” suggests that ambition is our own madness, based on our own private desires and is not considerate of the effects on others. This is a similar suggestion emphasised through Satan’s public vs. personal desires, having instructed the rebel angels through his persuasive speech “to do ought good will never be our task, but ever to do evil will be our sole delight.” Here, we understand that Satan instructs the rebel army to cause chaos in the army to defeat God’s reign of power and to gain his “blissful seat”; and the angels seem to follow his command to gain from their choice to fall, initially being disappointed with their choice – “is this the mournful gloom for that celestial light?” It is the rebel angels own self-greed alongside Satan’s own personally hidden desires to win the fight against God for his punishment which has caused their eternal suffering and torment of their previous life.

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The theme of disappointment similarly runs through The Duchess of Malfi as Bosola shows how someone who is always hopeful and ambitious will always be disappointed – “Who would rely upon these miserable dependencies, in expectation to be advanced tomorrow? What creature ever fed worse than hoping Tantalus?” It emphasises exactly how ambition causes the downfall of men who seek to drive further what cannot possibly be driven to new heights. The fact that someone who is ambitious will always be disappointed highlights the extremities of the maddening situation in which ambitions can cause torment and eternal suffering from longing to gain more; in this instance the Duchess’s brothers attempting to gain control over her actions.

Satan, the first angel to fall from Heaven was banished for his ambition and drives to disrupt the monarchy of God. After being banished to Hell to “dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire”, it is only then that the cost of being ambitious is recognised – “But his doom reserved him more wrath; for now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him” shows that Satan is regretful of his actions. Milton uses “adamantine chains” to describe the empowerment of God to banish Satan to an unbreakable prison; highlighting the extreme situation of self-torment and regret in which he is warped by. He shows that Satan is under an eternal curse, imprisoned in everlasting woe of “lost happiness and lasting pain”. The term “lost” is ironic as it emphasises the fact that after ambition has taken hold, it can become a “man’s madness” which is inescapable.

“So spake the apostate angel, vaunting aloud but racked with deep despair” suggests Satan has become maddened by his actions caused by his ambition to overthrow God. “Vaunting aloud but racked with deep despair” emphasises Satan’s furiousness of his punishment, and is seen unforgiving of God for his eternal suffering. However, it is this in which he discovers his longing and the ability of not being free, chains remaining unbreakable; he is unable to conquer his ambition, which has caused his maddening, wild grief.

Milton describes Satan’s Hell – “no light but rather darkness visible served only to discover the sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades; where peace and rest can never dwell”. Milton’s term of light as rather “darkness visible” highlights Satan’s blackened situation of ongoing internal suffering and manipulation of the mind. The term “peace and rest can never dwell” is used to emphasise the longing of activity and torture, an eternal suffering to act as a constant reminder of the situation caused solely by your own personal ambitions. “Hope never comes that comes to all, but torture without end still urges” shows that hope has been banished, and that Satan feels regret for his choice to seek more than what he had been given already. However, it is his self-greed and ambition which had caused Lucifer to become blind of his “celestial light”.

In a similar light, Ferdinand has become blinded by his own ambition to control the Duchess, and it is only after the death of his sister in which he realises how his desire has caused tragedy in not only his own life; but also in everyone around him. Bosola has been sent “to live in the court here and observe the Duchess, to note all peculiars of her behaviour.” as an observer for Ferdinand in order to have control over his sister. Having eventually caused the death of his sister through her brothers’ attempts to stop her from remarrying, it is clear that the curse of ambition causes the mind to react strangely and repent your actions, after being blinded by greed and personal desire; in this instance, ownership of the Duchess. Ferdinand is shown to have become entranced by his own image and has grown mad with it, caused by his own ambition – “look, what’s that follows me?”

Satan, although he repents his actions is still driven to conquer God’s power as he is believed that God was simply born into power and does not therefore make him the great leader. This aspires Satan and has led to the growth of his ambition to become the mighty leader of Hell. He has taken his ambition and is using the falling rebel angels as the poisoned darts as weaponry against God. It is Satan’s belief in his own achievement to have been the founder of Hell that he can become a mighty leader to rebel and eventually become just as powerful as God – “All is not lost, the unconquerable will and study of revenge; immortal hate and courage never to submit and yield.” It is shown that Satan’s immortal hatred for God having banished him to Hell, imprisoned for eternity that has stirred his emotions in order to rebel. His “immortal hate” is shown to be the reason for his revenge and continuing his initial ambition to “equal the most high”. His lasting “courage” which is “never to submit and yield” is what has kept Satan’s ambition driven and alive. Milton emphasises how strong personalities and characteristic previously known as heroic can used as a force for evil.

“Search for the heads of the greatest rivers in the world, they are simply but bubbles in the water” shows that Webster feels that not everyone is born into power is a great leader, they too can become entranced by ambitious desires themselves and simply ruin themselves. He shows that all great leaders are equal, and that there is no difference between one who was born into it, to one who has earned it. Like Satan, he shows that the Duchess can be overruled.

The reason for Satan’s downfall is soon recognised, but not learned upon as he remains invincible. “The mind and spirits remain invincible, and vigour soon returns” shows how ambition and determination can cause the growth of an undeniably fatal action. Milton shows how the mind is “invincible”, emphasising that ambition never dies and can take over the person who may once have been respected and looked up to. As “vigour soon returns”, it is easy to say that ambition; although sometimes lost is never forgotten and returns until the end.

“For when a man’s mind rides faster than his horse can gallop, they quickly both tire” also emphasises a similar point that ambition causes the end. Webster shows us that ambition can cause a person to become overtaken by their own self-greed and desires, in which they cannot be controlled or even, understand themselves.

Satan is shown to not have understood the consequences of his actions with his willingness to continue in his venture. “To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell, better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” Here, Milton suggests that ambition is never-ending. He shows that Satan’s ambition to reign is worth the aim in which he strives for and that it is better to strive for something that can be achieved; rather than living in false hope. Satan instructs his angels to “awake, arise or be forever fallen”, showing that if you understand what you truly want; you will follow your ambition, which in part is natural cause. Showing the angels who do not fall as being the “forever fallen” highlights ambition to be a persuasion of interest as to how things may be with a new lease of life, following what you want to do; rather than being instructed as to “serve in Heaven”.

Milton’s initial overthrow of Satan’s rebel army against God in the first war suggests that ambition is the cause of downfall, and that the rebel angel’s banishment as eternal suffering will be their price. It is, however that the angels do not see their “chief not in despair, to have found themselves not lost in loss itself, but he, his wanted pride soon recollecting with high words, gently raised their fainting courage and dispelled their fears” that defeat of ambition causes it to grow; perhaps until the mind has become manipulated by the effects of the actions undertaken and those that have occurred as a result.

“But his face, deep scars of thunder had entrenched and care sat on his faded cheek” shows that madness of ambition, having created “deep scars” in which Satan’s own “impetuous rage” was the cause. It highlights ambition to be the defeat of a man’s mind.

Webster, in a similar way to Milton shows that ambition is the cause of your own guilt. “Do not put yourself to such a voluntary torture, which proceeds out of your own guilt” suggests that an ambition acted against inflicts a madness which is derived from “your own guilt”. It is shown that ambition causes madness and is impossible to escape – “I have this night digged up a mandrake, and I am grown mad with it.” The image of ambition being a growth, continually smouldering the mind of another as a result of self-greed and determination to achieve what others have done before them is the cause of their own downfall. It is through their ambition to achieve that they become blinded by their own visage of life.

Ambition is said to be the cause of a man’s downfall. “Hereafter, you may, wisely cease to grieve for that which cannot be recovered” is shown to highlight that ambition is the cause of suffering, which you “grow mad in it” through “your own guilt”. The fact that it is said that you “grieve for what cannot be recovered” is similar to that in Paradise Lost. As Milton shows how Satan cannot recover his place beside God, being free and able to serve under him as a cost for a “celestial light” and free will.

In conclusion, it is clear that ambition is the sole cause of “a great man’s madness”. In Paradise Lost, Milton has explained that Satan’s desire has become his own downfall; imprisoned for eternity with the inability to regain freedom. It is with this entrapment and physical containment which has caused Satan’s own personal regret and maddening of the mind, “vaunting aloud and racked with deep despair”. It is shown that Satan’s continuity is also a lead to his downfall, being unable to see his flaw; forever feeling he is capable of overthrowing God of his seat and forever being disappointed. In The Duchess of Malfi, we have also seen that ambition is the cost of another man’s downfall. We can see that ambition is not only the cause of eternal suffering for yourself, but is the tragedy of others before you before you can realise your own actions. Webster shows how madness is derived from ambition – “that’s the greatest torture souls feel in Hell: In Hell they must live and cannot die”. He shows how madness is overtaken of the soul, being unable to rest as ambition is the sole driver for constant succession and greed. However, Webster shows that ambition is a “great man’s madness”; but is not necessarily affecting everyone in the same way. Although madness is the cause created from an ambitious nature, Webster shows us that “in Hell, there is one material fire; and yet it shall not burn all men alike.” Here, Webster describes that ambition can affect people in many ways; but in turn leads to madness and the suffering of your own actions.

Ambition in "The Duchess of Malfi" and "Paradise Lost"

Document Details

Word Count 2544
Page Count 6
Level AS and A Level
Subject English

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24 Writing Epic: Paradise Lost

Charles Martindale is Professor of Latin, University of Bristol. He is the author of John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (1986), Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (1993), and Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2005). Among his edited work is, with A. B. Taylor, Shakespeare and the Classics (2004).

Published: 18 September 2012
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Paradise Lost is stamped everywhere with John Milton's opinions and with his personality, in the manner of a Romantic or post-Romantic poet, but the poem is also much larger than Milton. It is often seen today as the inevitable climax of Milton's poetic career. Paradise Lost was not also largely ignored on its appearance, as is sometimes believed. Its greatness of derives from the intensity of Milton's love of both the Bible and classical epic, and his various strategies for mediating between them. Paradise Lost could not have been written without Milton's profound knowledge of ancient epic; but it is a modern poem, in no sense a pastiche of the classical. Milton's achievement in making an epic out of one of the West's major myths was of European scope and vision.

Without stopping to qualify the averment, the Old World has had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional characters and affairs, which have been great; but the New World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality, which shall be greater. In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and everything directly or indirectly tend, Old World or New. Walt Whitman, prefatory letter to Leaves of Grass (1889)

In the proem to Paradise Lost 9, at the turning point of the epic, Milton gives three potential hindrances to the completion of his heroic task (ll. 41–6). The first—for he is one of God's Englishmen—is the weather. Like many before and since, the Italophile Milton believed that the climate of the Mediterranean was more propitious for art and culture than that of the cold North among what Dr Johnson satirically terms a ‘lagging race of frosty grovellers’;. 1 in The History of Britain Milton argues that ‘civility’ has to be introduced from countries where ‘the sun, which we want, ripens wits as well as fruits’ ( CPW , v/i. 451). 2 The other two hindrances are both aspects of belatedness: Milton's own advancing years, and ‘an age too late’ (some believed that the world had been decaying since the Fall, a view of which Milton made imaginative use in Paradise Lost , though he had previously argued against it). 3 Even as a young man, in Sonnet VII (‘How soon hath time the subtle thief of youth’), Milton was worrying that the ‘hasting days’ might make impossible the achievement of his as yet unfocused aspirations. Now, in his fifties, to complete his epic he depended on the nightly visits of the Heavenly Muse, his ‘celestial patroness’, and, according to his nephew Edward Phillips, this inspiration was confined to the period from the autumn to the spring equinox 4 Jonathan Richardson tells us that Milton often lay awake whole nights unable to compose a single line, whereas at other times the verses flowed easy ‘with a certain impetus ’ 5 Clearly there were cogent reasons for anxiety.

From a later perspective, and on a Hegelian notion of literary history, by the late seventeenth century writing an epic on the classical model might seem not so much belated as already out of date, even if few realized it at the time. Dryden begins the Dedication to his version of the Aeneid (1697) with the resounding sentence ‘A heroic poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform’, and eighty years later Dr Johnson was still to concur: ‘By the general consent of critics, the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epic poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions.’ 6 But Dryden had to be content with translating another man's epic; likewise Pope, after the enormous success of his Iliad (1717), moralized his song, projecting but never realizing a heroic poem of his own on a British theme, his energies concentrated rather on satire and epistle. By the nineteenth century it had become clear that much of the old epic impulse had migrated to the junior and more amorphous genre of the novel.

How then did Milton succeed in composing the last wholly convincing European vernacular epic ‘truly such’ where so many others had failed or (like Sir Richard Blackmore with his Prince Arthur (1695)) were to fail? My answer would be that it was the sheer extent and intensity of Milton's long-pondered engagement with the classical epic tradition, probably beyond that of any other modern poet, which made this possible. Later Friedrich Schiller was to argue that the modern artist should turn away from the conformities of the present and find inspiration in antiquity for a revolutionary art: ‘Then, when he has become a man, let him return, a stranger, to his own century; not, however, to gladden it by his appearance, but rather, terrible like Agamemnon's son, to cleanse and to purify it.’ 7 In just such a manner Milton in Paradise Lost produced something radically new by a peculiarly profound engagement with ‘that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse … model’ ( Reason of Church-Government; CPW , i. 813), rethinking epic from the bottom up in an act of sustained imitation (Spenser's relationship with the ancients is much more relaxed, genial, and opportunistic by comparison). 8 The results, while in one sense owing so much to the tradition, are at the same time so disconcertingly new that Dryden was moved to deny that the poem, with its fusion of epic and tragic structures (‘I now must change / Those notes to tragic … sad task, yet argument / Not less but more heroic … ’ ( PL ix. 5–6, 13–14)), was an epic at all: Milton, he writes, would have ‘a better plea’ for being considered the successor of Virgil ‘if the Devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam; if the giant had not foiled the knight, and driven him out of his stronghold, to wander through the world with his lady errant; and if there had not been more machining persons than human in his poem’. 9 Paradise Lost is on such an account the most modern of epics precisely because it is the most fully engaged with antiquity (the revolutionary canvases of the French painter David would be an analogy in a different medium). Thus it is not the paradox it might seem that this in one sense most backward-looking of poets is also the poet who most insistently looks forward to future literary developments. Paradise Lost is stamped everywhere with Milton's opinions and with his personality, in the manner of a Romantic or post-Romantic poet (for example, the Wordsworth who egotistically charts the growth of the poet's mind), but the poem is also much larger than Milton, in part because he underwent the discipline of a traditional form. Authority is thus variously inscribed, not only in the prophetic voice of the vates inspired by God—it is also located from the first in the Western epic tradition descending from Homer. There may be transumption—Christianity is of course superior to paganism within this discourse—but paganism has its own measure of validity.

Paradise Lost is often seen today as the inevitable climax of Milton's poetic career. Indeed Milton himself may have come to think so (‘this subject for heroic song / Pleased me long choosing, and beginning late’ (ix. 25–6)). The two major disasters of his life—his blindness, and the ultimate failure of the political cause to which he had given so much energy—could readily be reconfigured as enabling conditions for his epic: Milton had in truth become the English Homer, the blind poet-prophet who could sing to his countrymen, who had yet again gone astray, of things invisible to mortal sight. The Virgilian triad, Virgil's seemingly relentless upward march from lesser to higher genre (itself a post-factum construction), had from the first served as a potential model. Milton always wished to be famous and to achieve something of prime literary note, for which he prepared himself by years of careful reading—‘the wearisome labours and studious watchings, wherein I have spent and tired out almost a whole youth’ ( An Apology ; CPW , i. 869). At the end of ‘Lycidas’ (1637), he gestures towards the ‘pastures new’ of a possible epic future, in a passage of ottava rima (the metre of Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata ); this could be part of a Virgilian progression or a gesture of deferral that was already a generic topos. A couple of years later, in Mansus (ll. 80–4), addressed to a patron of Tasso, and Epitaphium Damonis (ll. 162–8), he is more specific, sketching themes from early British history (though we cannot be sure he is not thinking of an epic in Latin). In The Reason of Church-Government (1642), very probably as part of a conscious strategy of presenting himself as a learned humanist, not a vulgar pamphleteer, he ranges over possible literary projects in the vernacular whereby he might undertake ‘what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country’, first in epic, then tragedy, then lyric, to produce ‘something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die’, but without indication of where his ultimate preference will alight ( CPW , i. 812, 810). Perhaps at one stage he seriously envisaged an Arthuriad or the like (with a ‘king or knight’ providing ‘the pattern of a Christian hero’), but if so it would doubtless have been highly Spenserian in style and conception (i. 813–14). By the time he wrote the History of Britain Milton had lost all confidence in the truth-value of early British history, a history ‘either wholly unknown, or obscured and blemished with fables’ ( CPW , v/i. 1; by contrast in PL viii. 6–7 Raphael is termed ‘divine historian’, since he can tell what actually happened, if in a form accommodated to Adam's and our understanding). The Trinity Manuscript contains lists of potential plots (compiled? 1639–42), sixty-seven of them biblical, including Paradise Lost and Adam Unparadised among several based on Genesis, and thirty-eight from British and Scottish history, but these are for tragedies, not epics ( CPW , viii. 554–85). 10

All this occasions Richard Helgerson's quip: ‘Like the middle class, Milton is always rising and never getting anywhere.’ 11 As with Virgil, the culminating epic only became inevitable once it had been completed, and only retrospectively does the poet's career cohere, for himself and for his readers. And whatever Milton's early inchoate plans, everything had changed with the execution of Charles I (1649). For a decade Milton wrote virtually no poetry, and may well have completely revised his sense of his own career trajectory. There is no mention of poetry in the autobiographical sections of the Second Defence (or of Homer in his list of the virtuous blind 12 ), and more than a little hostility to it and to ‘the polluted orts and refuse of Arcadias and Romances’ in Eikonoklastes ; admittedly, as is always the case with Milton, considerations of genre are at work—one of his objections to the King's book is that it becomes, indecorously for a work of politics, ‘a piece of poetry’ where ‘there wanted only rhyme’ ( CPW , iii. 364, 406). There are good reasons for thinking that Milton may have conceived his Second Defence as a prose substitute for epic; thus he praises Cromwell for surpassing ‘not only the achievement of our kings, but even the legends [ fabulas ] of our heroes’, and compares himself to an epic poet who observes the rules about unity of plot by praising ‘one heroic achievement of my countrymen’ ( CPW , iv/i. 672, 685). 13 Contingent events again changed the course of Milton's life, and brought him at last to an epic of a very different stamp from anything he had imagined earlier (there is some evidence that Milton began Paradise Lost in 1658, the year of Cromwell's death, but it must mainly have been written during the Restoration). 14 It is not easy, in secular history present or past, to determine whose side God is on, and no longer will Britain be ‘the praise and the heroic song of all posterity’ ( Of Reformation; CPW , i. 597). Defeat may have helped to give Milton the imaginative freedom he needed as an epic poet. 15

Paradise Lost was not largely ignored on its appearance, as is sometimes believed. On the contrary the early editions sold well, and the poem had keen admirers from the first. Dryden echoes it with increasing frequency in his verse, as well as adapting it for the stage in A State of Innocence (publ. 1677). 16 Nonetheless it is true that it was the publishers, editors, critics, and biographers of the eighteenth century who firmly established its reputation as an English classic, a heroic poem truly such and of European importance. The first commentary, indeed the first extended commentary on any English poem, appeared (to accompany a text put out by Jacob Tonson, who obtained the copyright) as early as 1695: Annotations on Milton's Paradise Lost by Patrick Hume, ‘wherein the texts of Sacred Writ, relating to the poem, are quoted; the parallel places and imitations of the most excellent Homer and Virgil cited and compared; all the obscure parts rendered in phrases more familiar; the old and obsolete words, with their originals, explained and made easy to the English reader’. Marcus Walsh, in his study of eighteenth-century editing, argues that Hume took English biblical commentary as his model; it is much more plausible to say that Hume simply provided for Milton the kind of scholarly apparatus long available for Homer, Virgil, and other classical poets. 17 A series of commentaries followed culminating in Thomas Newton's important variorum edition of 1749, designed, as the Preface puts it, to present the poem ‘as the work of a classic author cum notis variorum’ and published by the younger Tonson. With extensive notes under the text Paradise Lost now looked exactly like a classical epic. The standing of the poem gained even from the wayward attentions of Richard Bentley, the greatest classical scholar of the age; his implied criticisms 18 only served to stimulate skilful defences, and he was quickly figured as, precisely, a Satanic reader, since, in the words of the author of Milton Restored, and Bentley Deposed (1732), ‘this way of restoring, i.e. interpolating by guess, is so sacrilegious an intrusion that, as it had its rise, so it is hoped it will have its fall with you’. 19

In this reception of Paradise Lost as the great English epic, perhaps the key work is the series of eighteen essays published by Joseph Addison in the Spectator in 1712, comprising six papers on general issues, and one on each of the twelve books. Published together in 1719 and often reprinted, they constituted something startlingly novel: in effect a short monograph on a modern English writer. 20 Voltaire scarcely exaggerated when he wrote that Addison ‘pointed out the most hidden beauties of the Paradise Lost , and settled for ever its reputation’. 21 It was a commonplace to make a complimentary comparison of an English writer, however minor, with one of the ancients. Dryden had produced an epigram for Tonson's 1688 edition, ingeniously turned after a Latin original by Selvaggi (now identified with an expatriate Englishman, David Codner):

Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England, did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpassed; The next in majesty; in both the last. The force of nature could no further go: To make a third, she joined the former tw

But a man is not on oath in a conventional laudatory poem, and there is plenty of evidence that Dryden did not think Milton the equal of Homer or Virgil. Addison is making a different kind of claim, that in sober truth Milton's epic is a work comparable in scope and stature only with those of Homer and Virgil, and indeed in certain respects superior to them, and he sets out to show in detail how such a claim can be made good. At the beginning of the first paper he quotes the words with which Propertius (2. 34. 65) had greeted, in advance of its publication, Virgil's Aeneid: cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai (‘yield you Roman writers, yield you Greek’)—the following line hangs for the cognoscenti in the air: nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade (‘something or other greater than the Iliad is being born’). Given the extraordinary standing of Homer and Virgil at the time, Addison's claim is far indeed from being the commonplace which, through the quality of his demonstration and his authority as a critic, it soon became.

Addison writes in a very different critical idiom from ours; he has a respect for the ‘rules’ we find it difficult to share, and, while he points to individual ‘beauties’, he does not include passages of close reading of the kind with which we have become familiar (for these one must go to the commentators, particularly the Richardsons, in what are still the most sensitive notes on the poem). But Addison will be a particularly useful guide for considering Paradise Lost as epic writing for four main reasons. 22 First, as someone soaked from early days in classical literature he has an instinctive feeling for where Milton is imitating the ancients that perhaps no modern reader (even a scholar) can fully share (he also of course knows the Bible intimately, and admires its literary qualities). Secondly, although not a contemporary, and belonging to a very different political milieu (one in which Milton's political radicalism and unorthodox religious beliefs are censured or downplayed), Addison is far closer than we are to much that Milton and his contemporaries took for granted in relation to classical literature and the critical debates involved in its reception. It is sometimes said that the ‘neoclassical’ Addison could not understand the ‘baroque’ sensibilities of Milton; this is misleading—the whole period from 1580 to 1780 can properly be seen as the neoclassical phase of our literature. Even where Addison censures some ‘fault’ in Paradise Lost (for example, the puns or the allegorical episodes involving Sin and Death), Milton would have had no difficulty in understanding the basis of the criticism (he was well versed in Italian and other debates about the application of Aristotle's doctrines and the nature of epic). Thirdly, Addison always treats Paradise Lost first and foremost as a work of imaginative literature. Modern critics often fall into the trap of explaining the poem wholly by way of the prose works; but in the poem we find a more open, more generous, and multifaceted writer than in much of the prose (with its tendency to overstatement). Thus the Milton who so relishes attacking his enemies, at length and with no holds barred, is largely (though not wholly) absent. Likewise that Milton believed he was inspired does not entail that he thought Paradise Lost had the status of Scripture; it is an epic poem on a Christian subject, not a definitive work of systematic Christian theology (hence in part its greater orthodoxy than De Doctrina Christiana , usually put down to fear of censorship). In De Doctrina Christiana we can read what Milton (if he it is) thinks was involved, theologically, in the Fall of Man ( CPW , vi. 382–92); the poem shows us this in action, sympathetically, psychologically, with human generosity and delicacy, not so far from the manner of a novel.

Finally, Addison exhibits more catholicity of taste than most of his successors. To an extent the history of Milton criticism will prove to be the history of a narrowing of response. Where F. R. Leavis perversely found in Paradise Lost only a monotonous uniformity of grandeur that ‘functions by rote’, Addison rightly insisted on variousness: ‘I have endeavoured to show how some passages are beautiful by being sublime, others by being soft, others by being natural; which of them are recommended by the passion, which by the moral, which by the sentiment, and which by the expression.’ 23 Many readers today think that Milton's devil has all the best tunes, and that these tunes generally come courtesy of the Greek and Latin classics. But Milton clearly valued the Bible for literary as well as for theological reasons, though perhaps it is the case that he was more often inspired by the Old Testament than by the New. C. S. Lewis thought that you needed to have a ‘romantic’ taste to be attracted to the Bible as literature, and Milton certainly responded to its combination of boldness, simplicity, and the sublime. 24 The evocative lines about Jacob's ladder, some of the finest in the poem, are a good illustration:

The stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw Angels ascending and descending, bands Of guardians bright, when he from Esau fled To Padan-Aram in the field of Luz, Dreaming by night under the open sky, And waking cried, This is the gate of heaven . (iii. 510–15)

‘This is the gate of heaven’ is a direct quotation from Genesis (28: 17), and Milton retains the simple vocabulary of the English Bible and employs a straightforward, unconfusing syntax, while relishing the resonant biblical names, and enhancing the sense of wonder and wistfulness. This is sublime, but it is a biblical as much as a classicizing sublime, conveying the aspect of Genesis to which alone in classical antiquity the author we call Longinus rather surprisingly responded. 25 True, these lines come from a passage about Satan, on whose exclusion from heaven they may thus bestow some pathos, but their flavour is far indeed from the maimed Satanic sublime as it unfolds in the opening scenes in Hell. The greatness of Paradise Lost derives from the intensity of Milton's love of both the Bible and classical epic, and his various strategies for mediating between them.

It is significant in this regard that, whereas the biblical Book 7 is comparatively neglected by modern critics, Addison by contrast rightly saw it as one of the wonders of the poem. In it we find ‘an instance of that sublime which is not mixed and worked up with passion’ (in contrast to the preceding War in Heaven, which Addison also greatly admired, some excesses aside, finding it, too, sublime, in contrast to many moderns who see the writing as pitched just this side of absurdity, closer to mock than genuine heroic). Scripture is again the main source, but, Addison suggests, Milton also imagines how Homer might have treated the subject of Creation, testing the connections between two different traditions of sublime writing (the compasses, for example, are ‘conceived altogether in Homer's spirit’). The vividness of the writing (an example of what the theorists of antiquity called enargeia ) exhibits ‘the whole energy of our tongue’, and means that ‘the reader seems present at this wonderful work’ (Shawcross, 195–9). The book is a genial and joyous expansion of the opening of Genesis, which indeed displays much of Milton's long-breathed mastery:

Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay With fry innumerable swarm, and shoals Of fish that with their fins and shining scales Glide under the green wave, in schools that oft Bank the mid-sea; part single or with mate Graze the seaweed their pasture, and through groves Of coral stray, or sporting with quick glance Show to the sun their waved coats dropped with gold, Or in their pearly shells at ease attend Moist nutriment, or under rocks their food In jointed armour watch … (vii. 399–409)

Writing like this (which also owes something to Ovid) inspired some of the best descriptive poetry of the eighteenth century, as well as one of the greatest musical works of all time, Haydn's Creation . There is an enormous sense of the plenitude of the world—‘air, water, earth, / By fowl, fish, beast, was flown, was swam, was walked / Frequent’ (ll. 502–4)—and of Milton's gratitude for it, a gratitude that fostered such linguistic daring and that we, like Addison, might want to share. But gratitude, as Christopher Ricks has reminded us, though one of the things ‘literature lives to realize’, is not a Satanic characteristic:

Even the fallen natural world may be alive to this paradisal possibility. A hope, at least, is to be scented. There are wafted ‘Sabean Odours from the spicie shoare / Of Arabie the blest’, whereupon ‘many a league / Cheard with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles’. With how fine an air ‘the grateful smell ’ turns to and into ‘ smiles ’. We should be grateful to Milton, and so we are. Meanwhile Satan, the great ingrate, in this his unsmiling passage into the Garden of Eden, was seeking to darken this very passage of Milton. 26

This is finely said, and in addition a fine piece of literary criticism. But gratitude, as Ricks goes on to say, is no easy thing, rather it is all too fatally easy for us to share in Satan's darkening. Clearly Milton himself felt the full force of the attraction (there is much of Milton in his Satan—as in his Eve, and indeed his God), but, unlike many of his modern critics, he did not surrender entirely to it.

Addison's initial papers deal with Paradise Lost under four aspects: the fable, the characters, the sentiments, and the language. These are traditional categories, 27 and Addison touches on many topics about which others had written at greater length, including Tasso in his Discorsi del poema eroico (1594), which Milton is likely to have studied with care, as he did the Liberata itself. 28 In both its ten-and its twelve-book versions Paradise Lost was subtitled simply ‘a poem’. 29 Addison starts his discussion by saying that those who would deny that it is properly heroic may call it a ‘divine poem’ if they please: ‘for those who allege it is not an heroic poem, they advance no more to the diminution of it than if they should say Adam is not Aeneas, nor Eve Helen’. But just as Milton starts Paradise Lost by ostentatious and emulous imitation of the openings of the Iliad and Aeneid (including a sustained play on the word ‘first’ that implies that his belated poem is in another sense primary), so Addison examines it ‘by the rules of epic poetry’ (Shawcross, 147). For the early modern critics of epic, the ‘fable’, encompassing what we would call both plot and structure, came first. Ben Jonson ( Discoveries , 3317) gives elegant expression to the orthodoxy: ‘The fable is called the imitation of one entire and perfect action, whose parts are so joined and knit together as nothing in the structure can be changed, or taken away, without impairing or troubling the whole, of which there is a proportionable magnitude in the members.’ That fable should also be verisimilar, probable; Paradise Lost , even if it contains figurations of various kinds, is not ( pace many modern critics) an allegorical narrative, at least not in the manner of Spenser or even Dante. Addison stresses the enormous skill with which Milton constructs such an epic fable out of the opening chapters of Genesis and other parts of the Bible, despite having ‘to proceed with the greatest caution in everything that he added out of his own invention’, given the choice of a scriptural subject; ‘indeed’, he continues, ‘notwithstanding all the restraints he was under, he has filled his story with so many surprising incidents, which bear so close analogy with what is delivered in Holy Writ, that it is capable of pleasing the most delicate reader, without giving offence to the most scrupulous’ (Shawcross, 150–1). Johnson thought that ‘considered with respect to design’ Paradise Lost ‘may claim the first place … among the productions of the human mind’ (that is, even above Homer's Iliad ): ‘He has involved in his account of the fall of Man the events which preceded and those that were to follow it; he has interwoven the whole system of theology with such propriety that every part appears to be necessary’ ( Lives of the Poets , i. 282–3). Many early modern critics, following Aristotle, argued that the unified epic plot needed to be such that it could be taken in at an overall view, producing what Addison calls ‘an agreeable story sufficient to employ the memory without overcharging it’ (one could contrast the meandering, easily forgotten, multiple story lines of Ariosto or Spenser 30 ). Coleridge is thus being a good neo-Aristotelian when he comments: ‘The story of Milton might be told in two pages—it is this which distinguishes an Epic Poem from a Romance in metre .’ 31 Indeed, from the fourth issue of the first edition brief prose arguments were provided (originally printed together, but from 1674 dispersed among the books), which show clearly the articulation of the fable.

Milton, in accordance with Horatian prescript and in imitation of Homer and Virgil, starts the action, with powerful immediacy, in the middle, with the fallen angels cast out of Heaven; preceding events are subsequently described in flashback. But this is no mere imitation for imitation's sake (however skilful); rather the structure is connected to the crucial role of time in Paradise Lost . It allows Milton to make man's first disobedience, as the poem's subject, the climax of the action, while also showing its prehistory (which renders it intelligible) and its consequences (which involve us all); Raphael's retrospective narrative is elegantly balanced by Michael's prospective one. It also allows us to approach the unfallen Adam and Eve gradually and in the first instance through the eyes of the fallen Satan, which we must learn to see beyond. There are at least two distinct strokes of genius in all this. First, the fall of the angels is skilfully linked with the fall of man (in a way that is parallel, as Addison observes, to the link between the rise of Carthage and the rise of Rome in the Aeneid ). Addison comments: ‘its running parallel with the great action of the poem hinders it from breaking the unity so much as another episode would have done that had not so great an affinity with the principal subject’ (Shawcross, 149). Secondly the ‘machining persons’ become integral to the action rather than mere decorative additions, too obviously copied after Homer and Virgil (Milton's devils and angels, as Addison observes, are moreover characterized variously and with great skill). 32 The use of a scriptural plot was controversial (Tasso had advised against it), as was the proper role of the gods (if any) in a modern epic (Tasso argued that, for reasons of verisimilitude, Christian machines are needed to provide the epic marvellous, since we no longer believe in the pagan gods). There was much debate about the best subject matter; for Tasso stories about Arthur or Charlemagne or the Crusades were particularly suitable, as events in Christian history neither too remote nor too recent. Milton's bold solution to this whole set of problems seems easy and inevitable once arrived at, but nothing better illustrates his radical reshaping of the genre. The opening of the Liberata is merely dutifully imitative in comparison; after the invocation God despatches Gabriel (decked out like Virgil's Mercury) to urge Goffredo into action, and this is followed by council of war and catalogue. Tasso has not thought hard enough about how to combine the pagan and the Christian, and as a result is here controlled by, rather than controlling, his ancient models.

Addison turns next to the actors. Here he awards the palm to Homer, who ‘has excelled all the heroic poets that ever wrote in the multitude and variety of his characters’; Virgil, by contrast, ‘falls infinitely short … both as to their variety and novelty’. As for Milton, ‘he has introduced all the variety his fable was capable of receiving’. The contrast between the fallen and unfallen Adam and Eve means that there are as it were four characters in the poem, and moreover it is ‘impossible for any of its readers, whatever nation, country, or people he may belong to, not to be related’ to ‘the principal actors’ as being ‘not only our progenitors, but our repre-sentatives’ (in Aristotelian terms ‘like us’): ‘no less than our utmost happiness is concerned, and lies at stake in all their behaviour’. 33 Johnson famously claimed that ‘the want of human interest is always felt’ ( Lives of the Poets , 290). Addison by contrast shows how the poem is chock-full throughout of human interest. Famously Satan (who in Addison's view outclasses Homer's Odysseus in subtlety and variety of stratagem), though grander than most human beings, is human enough (all too human) and humanly attractive enough to explain the Satanist interpretation. And the poem is also full of things human beings are interested in—including ideas. The extended epic similes, with their varied subject matter, some of it taken from the modern world (what other epic makes room for Galileo's telescope?), are one prime means by which the poem's scope is extended in marvellously varied ways (we shall return to them). We might recall that Paradise Lost was one of the few books from which Frankenstein's monster received an education instructing him about humanity and human culture.

Addison also touches on another much debated matter: the identity of the hero of Paradise Lost. Over the years many candidates have been proposed, for reasons that often reflect the varying ideologies of the proposer: Adam, Adam and Eve, Eve, Satan, the Son (Addison's eventual, somewhat pious choice 34 ), the reader, Milton. If we must have a hero (or rather heroes), it surely has to be ‘our grand parents’ as protagonists of the principal action. But it is not clear that the question is well formulated. Aristotle called not for a single hero but for a single action, praising Homer over the poets of Heracleids and Theseids that covered the whole lives of their protagonists ( Poetics 1451). The Iliad has at least two protagonists, likewise the Liberata ; Lucan's Pharsalia (as the epic of Republicanism, a key if still comparatively neglected intertext for Paradise Lost ) has three. 35 One might rather say that Milton's fable sets out and tests and revaluates different models of the heroic (the great epics had always done this); the proem to Book 9 assails previous epics for their defective vision, recommending ‘the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom / Unsung’ (ll. 31–3). Satan is, more closely than other characters, associated with the classical warrior hero. Hazlitt observes that ‘Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the vulgar and physical insignia of the devil, and clothed him with other greater and intellectual terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and converting the grotesque and deformed into the ideal and classical’, while for Coleridge Satan exhibits ‘a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance and a ruined splendour’. 36 In ii. 445–56 for persuasive effect Satan recycles, or rather taints in advance, Sarpedon's famous enunciation of the heroic code of noblesse oblige (Iliad , 12. 310–28); Milton in general showed little concern with honour—‘liberty’ is always the word of power for him—and the narrative makes clear that Satan's motives are far from disinterested. Satan's heroism is clearly flawed, like that of the Englishmen in A Brief History of Moscovia who discovered Russia by the Northern Ocean in what ‘might have seemed an enterprise almost heroic if any higher end than the excessive love of gain and traffic had animated the design’ ( CPW , viii. 524). Nonetheless David Reid is right to say that Satan's heroism is in its way genuine (if tragically misapplied) because he is an individual, not an allegorical type, just as the poem charts ‘a human action, not just a rhetorical scheme disguised as fiction’ (we can link all this with Milton's belief in free will). 37

Abdiel, by contrast, like Cato in the Pharsalia (opponent of the ever-moving Caesar), represents, in a poem of action, virtuous immobility: ‘Among the faithless, faithful only he; / Among innumerable false, unmoved’ (v. 897–8). Like Jesus in Paradise Regained he is heroic not for acting but for ‘standing’, for resisting the pressure to act (if Eve had rebuffed Satan, that would have been heroism of this type). One may feel a particularly strong identification on Milton's part here, but he was attracted also to more dynamic models. The Son not only makes his heroic offer of self-sacrifice (previously parodied, when Satan volunteers to make the hazardous journey to earth), but is presented as a conquering hero in the War in Heaven (though in biblical not classical terms). ‘Domestic’ Adam (ix. 318) and Eve, who represent a non-militaristic model of heroism (that anticipates features of the novel), have shown an ability to grow and develop and engage in varied activity (lovemaking, gardening, education through conversing, creating new forms of prayer and love poetry) even in their short time in Paradise; after the Fall they again display their continued capacity for change through repentance (a process pioneered by Eve). 38 Tasso had sanctioned love as well as wrath as subject matter wholly proper for epic, 39 and from its wrathful opening Paradise Lost gradually mutates into the great epic of love; Milton, excoriated by Johnson for ‘something like a Turkish contempt of females’ ( Lives of the Poets , 276), becomes in the process the author of some of the world's greatest love poetry. In the words of David Quint, ‘it is the free choice of Adam and Eve to accept grace and to love one another again that has impressed many readers to be the most signal … act of heroism in Paradise Lost ’. 40 Again revised epic form and new content work together: ‘only the unique subject of the Fall allows the poet of Paradise Lost to invent a poetry of the mind that still reads like epic because it can subsume traditional epic structures and styles into its revelation of the soul's history’. 41

Addison's third and fourth categories are the sentiments (where in ‘the sublimity of his thoughts’ Milton ‘triumphs over all the poets both modern and ancient, Homer only excepted’) and the language. 42 Addison acknowledges that, in respect of the style of Paradise Lost , ‘the learned world is very much divided’ (Shawcross, 158). Modern readers (because of the prestige of Shakespeare and later developments in English poetry influenced by Milton) often do not realize how radical and controversial was Milton's choice of blank verse as the metre for a modern epic (Johnson devotes considerable space to the issue, only eventually conceding that ‘I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer’; Lives of the Poets , 294). There were few precedents, and these insufficiently weighty or positively discouraging: Surrey's version of two books of the Aeneid , Marlowe's of Lucan's First Book (a work that merits more attention from Miltonists), Trissino's L'Italia liberata dai goti , an over-conscientious imitation of Homer which, in Tasso's words, ‘few mention and still fewer read’ (in contrast to the success of Ariosto's rule-breaking epic romance). 43 Tasso himself, on numerological grounds, strongly recommended the virtues of ottava rima (though in a different genre he employed blank verse for his hexameral Sette giornate del mondo creato ), 44 and by 1660 there was an almost universal assumption that non-dramatic verse required rhyme among English poets and critics. For the second edition Milton supplied an eloquent defence of his unorthodox decision:

The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre. … Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme … as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another … This neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect … that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.

One can imagine the poet relishing the frisson in his evocation of ‘ancient liberty’, and some modern scholars have concluded that the overriding reason for his choice of metre was political. But unrhyming verse on the model of the ancients had long been a humanist aspiration (Roger Ascham in The Schoolmaster urged his countryman to ‘understand rightfully our rude beggarly rhyming, brought first into Italy by Goths and Huns, when all good verses, and all good learning too were destroyed by them’); 45 and Milton may have been influenced too by the freedom of Hebrew verse. Politics and poetics cannot so easily be elided: in 1667 the royalist Dryden used the image of the ‘slavery’ of rhyme. 46 Rather, blank verse, with frequent use of enjambment and variation in the position of the caesura, enabled Milton, uniquely, to write an epic that was truly comparable in style to the Iliad or Aeneid , that successfully Englished Virgil's majestic paragraphs and variety of verse movement, and the ongoing forward motion of Homer (by contrast the Spenserian stanza in its very shape suits the complex windings of romantic epic). 47 From his ‘careful’ education Milton had, from ‘the best and elegantest authors of the learned tongues’, obtained ‘an ear that could measure a just cadence, and scan without articulating’ ( An Apology; CPW , i. 914). T. S. Eliot, who called Milton ‘the greatest master in our language of freedom within form’, describes the results well:

It is the period, the sentence and still more the paragraph, that is the unit of Milton's verse; and emphasis on the line structure is the minimum necessary to provide a counter-pattern to the period structure. … The peculiar feeling, almost a physical sensation of a breathless leap, communicated by Milton's long periods, and by his alone, is impossible to procure from rhymed verse. 48

For a classicist no other modern epic feels much if at all like Homer or Virgil.

Many early readers found Milton's verse insufficiently smooth (indeed he sought to carry into English the calculated roughness and difficulty, the asprezza sought by the Italians Tasso and Giovanni Della Casa for heroic poetry 49 ), or felt that blank verse was designed for the eye not the ear and was too close to prose (hence its appropriateness for drama)—throwing it ‘off from prose’, as Addison puts it, accordingly requires ‘pomp of sound, and energy of expression’ (Shawcross, 161). Addison, like other early critics, was guided by Longinus' treatise On the Sublime to a sense of Milton's achievement (the work is on Milton's ideal school syllabus in Of Education , but its influence hugely increased as a result of Boileau's translation of 1674). Addison argued that the style of epic needed to be ‘both perspicuous and sublime’; sublimity required that it ‘deviate from the common forms and ordinary phrases of speech’ (Shawcross, 158, 159), without falling into the opposite vice of grandiloquent bombast (the fault of Statius—and Shakespeare). Addison details after Aristotle some of the ways that this deformation can be achieved, including metaphor, the use of old words and coinages, extension or contraction of particular words (as with ‘eremite’ for ‘hermit’); in chapter 5 of Tasso's Discorsi Milton could find detailed advice on how to achieve the grand manner, illustrated in particular from Virgil and Petrarch. Most controversial, then as now, was Milton's resort to foreign idioms, which Addison explains with succinct precision:

Another way of raising the language, and giving it a poetical turn, is to make use of the idioms of other tongues. … Milton in conformity with the practice of the ancient poets and with Aristotle's rule, has infused a great many Latinisms as well as Graecisms, and sometimes Hebraisms, into the language of his poem. … Under this head may be reckoned the placing the adjective after the substantive, the transposition of words, the turning the adjective into a substantive, with several other foreign modes of speech, which this poet has naturalized to give his verse the greater sound and throw it out of prose. (Shawcross, 160)

For example, in ‘Yet oft his heart, divine of something ill, / Misgave him’ (ix. 845–6) the rare use of ‘divine’ to mean ‘foreseeing’, followed by a genitive (like divinus in Latin, as in Horace's Ode 3. 27. 10), constitutes a small defamiliarizing touch to heighten a passage which might otherwise be overly prosaic 50 (moderns may argue that such a notion of decorum is outdated, but even today you could translate the opening words of the Aeneid ‘arms and the bloke I sing’ only in parody). Eighteenth-century critics and editors all agreed that Milton made extensive use in particular of Latinate diction and syntax. Modern scholars, including Alastair Fowler and Thomas Corns, reacting to the attacks on Milton's style by Leavis and Eliot, have sought to minimize the number and importance of Milton's supposed Latinisms. 51 Because ordinary English and the English poetic tradition in general owes so much to Latin, the matter is difficult to determine with any exactitude, but the instincts of Addison and the rest (much better read than we are in classical literature) are not lightly to be ignored. Fowler goes so far as to call Paradise Lost ‘the most colloquial secondary epic ever written’. 52 This cannot be quite right (one thinks of the poem's sixteen-line opening sentence, even grander than its equivalent in the Aeneid , or the glamorous magniloquence associated with Satan), though it is true that Milton often employs very plain diction (much of it of Anglo-Saxon origin) and can write with astonishing simplicity (after the manner of his favourite Homer). 53 Where ordinary prose would run ‘Thus saying, she softly withdrew her hand from her husband's hand’, Milton creates supreme poetry by the slightest alteration of ‘normal’ syntax, with the verb held back to the end and the adverbial use of the adjective (both, as it happens, features of Latin—the rhythm tells against Ricks's view that ‘soft’ might also be an adjective 54 ), the two hands close together before the final parting, though with a caesura between them: ‘Thus saying, from her husband's hand her hand / Soft she withdrew’ (ix. 385–6); but this moving directness (in the Richardsons' words, ‘a master-touch of tenderness in few words’) is further enhanced by the contrast with the richer and more complex movement of what follows. The language of Paradise Lost is strikingly varied, matching the variety of content, in accordance with the underlying principle of decorum, ‘the grand masterpiece to observe’ ( Of Education, CPW , ii. 405); epic style, Tasso observes, allows considerable flexibility, encompassing both ‘the solemnity of the tragic’ and ‘a lyrical floweriness’. 55

Arguments about whether a particular Miltonic usage is strictly speaking a ‘Latinism’ or not (with varying definitions of the term) can become rather sterile. John Hale, in one of the finest books on Paradise Lost of the last decade, suggests that a more profitable approach would be to acknowledge the all-pervading importance of Milton's multilingualism on his style. Milton knew at least ten languages, translating from five, and composing poetry in four, and this ‘polyglot versatility’ left its mark on all his work. 56 The very title of Paradise Lost (brilliantly chosen, though easily taken for granted) is an interlingual gesture: paraphrasable as ‘the losing of Paradise’, it successfully naturalizes the Latin ab urbe condita construction (‘from the founding of the city’), while hinting at a key generic analogue whose title had the identical grammatical form, Gerusalemme liberata (‘the liberating of Jerusalem’); but at the same time the monosyllabic finality of the past participle conveys our irrevocable exclusion from Eden. Milton had an intense love for words, their etymologies, their ambiguities and interconnections, their exfoliating significations. In his metaphrastic translation of Horace's Pyrrha Ode he tested the relationship between English and Latin almost to destruction; ‘precisely because he could think in Latin or English, or both or neither, he cared about their differences and limits’. 57 In Paradise Lost he used his knowledge of other languages not to write English ‘on a perverse and pedantic principle’ as Dr Johnson maintained ( Lives of the Poets , 293), but to energize it, to maximize and extend its expressive potential (from time to time the bold experimentation may fall flat, but, as Longinus insisted in a much invoked passage, genius that incurs danger is always preferable to successful mediocrity). So ‘liquid’ becomes a word of much greater linguistic resource because Milton is intimate with the various ways liquidus was used in Latin; 58 something similar can be said about much of the poem's vocabulary, for example ‘ruin’ (always in Paradise Lost with some sense of falling, from the Latin ruo ), or ‘rapture’ (which in vii. 36, in connection with Orpheus and the maenads, means ‘transport of delight’ but glances at both prophetic inspiration and dismemberment). 59 On occasion the simultaneous evocation of different meanings congeals into the kind of wordplay of which many eighteenth-century critics inclined to disapprove, for example ‘casual fruition’ (iv. 767), where ‘casual’, from the Latin casus, punningly alludes to the Fall. Sparks are struck off words as they combine; in ‘for nature here / Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will / Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet, / Wild above rule or art; enormous bliss’ (v. 294–7), ‘wantoned’ clashes with ‘virgin’, the pent-up energies reaching an immense resolution in ‘enormous’, which unites the meaning ‘huge’ with the etymological ‘outside the ordinary’ (Latin norma )—precisely ‘above rule’ (the Richardsons comment: ‘what shall I call it? A monstrous bliss! It was before said Nature here wantoned as a girl; now she is stark wild, so profuse is she of her beauties. Words cannot carry an idea beyond this’). The result is ‘an incessant, sometimes obtrusive, activity of mind’ which prevents the magnificent style from becoming bland or pompous. 60

Even if his brief discussion involves simplification, Addison also has a better sense than many moderns of how Milton's epic similes work, quite unlike ‘the quaint similes and little turns of wit, which are so much in vogue among modern poets’: Milton, by contrast,

never quits his simile till it rises to some very great idea, which is often foreign to the occasion that gave birth to it. … The resemblance does not, perhaps, last above a line or two, but the poet runs on with the hint, till he has raised out of it some glorious image or sentiment, proper to inflame the mind of the reader, and to give it that sublime kind of entertainment, which is suitable to the nature of an heroic poem.

Addison continues by quoting with approval Boileau's defence of Homer's ‘long-tailed’ similes as properly designed ‘to relieve and diversify his subjects’ (Shawcross, 172–3). Modern critics are generally unhappy with this notion of ‘relief’, perhaps wrongly confusing it with inattention (in the often-quoted words of Jonathan Richardson, the reader of Milton ‘must be always upon duty’, 61 in the similes as much as elsewhere); they are more concerned to find precise correspondences between simile and narrative, and often turn similes into miniature theological allegories. 62 Addison and the eighteenth-century critics by contrast grant greater imaginative freedom to both poet and reader. In his note on Iliad 5. 116 Pope observes that Homer in his similes ‘affects … rather to present the mind with a great image than to fix it down to an exact one’ (a mark of sublimity). Johnson writes in similar vein of Milton:

he does not confine himself within the limits of rigorous comparison: his great excellence is amplitude, and he expands the adventitious image beyond the dimensions which the occasion required. Thus, comparing the shield of Satan to the orb of the moon, he crowds the imagination with the discovery of the telescope, and all the wonders which the telescope discovers. ( Lives of the Poets , 287)

In ix. 1099 ff. Adam and Eve use leaves of the fig tree to cover their nakedness:

not that kind for fruit renowned, But such as at this day to Indians known In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms Branching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow Above the mother tree, a pillared shade High overarched, and echoing walks between; There oft the Indian herdsman shunning heat Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds At loopholes cut through thickest shade …

This passage (which Coleridge chose to illustrate how ‘imagination’ differs from ‘fancy’, praising in particular the ‘echoing walks between’ 63 ) is structured like a long-tailed simile whether or not it should be strictly so categorized (the leaves may be those of the banyan tree, or they may be like them). As such, along with a number of similes, it brings into the poem the romance of exotic geography and ethnography. A few lines further on Adam and Eve are likened to the Native Americans discovered by Columbus (1115–18); these comparisons produce a striking shift of perspective in our sense of our ‘grand parents’, not previously presented as in any way distanced or ‘primitive’ or foreign. Fowler's note proposes various strategies for increasing the passage's relevance to the context or the poem's themes, including the suggestions that ‘the proliferating tree may figure ramifying original sin’ or is ‘a tree of life, with loopholes letting in general grace’, or that the herdsman is ‘an antitype, in his pastoral care, to the corrupt clergy’. This is to turn the passage into a theological cryptogram. It seems better to invoke the Kantian free-play of the mental faculties in the aesthetic that does not result in strict determination, a free-play encouraged by the dialectic of similarity and difference necessarily involved in a simile (which in practice readers will construe differently). Certainly the passage may resonate suggestively with others in the poem, for example the nuptial bower (‘the roof / Of thickest covert was inwoven shade’, iv. 692–3) or the Vallombrosa simile (‘where the Etrurian shades / High overarched embower’, i. 303–4), but without reductive closure. Crowding the imagination will do very well to describe the experience. 64

The similes of Paradise Lost are one of the poem's ‘beauties’, and vastly extend its reach and scope; in this too they are like the similes of the Iliad —indeed their subject matter is more various. At the end of Book 1 the devils are compared to elves (777–90):

Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount, or fairie elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest side, Or fountain some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear: At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds. Thus incorporeal spirits to smallest forms Reduced their shapes immense, and were at large …

The simile can be read (as it was by Voltaire) as straightforwardly satirizing the devils by comparing them with something small and insignificant (but is not an easy equation of the two itself Satanic?); certainly the pun on ‘at large’ puts the devils in their place, while the dizzyingly swift shifts in scale disorient the reader (Kant later called this ‘the mathematical sublime’ 65 ). But the Richardsons are also right to say in their note that ‘the picture is exceeding pretty and delightful’, providing a contrast to the desolations of Hell. The metamorphosis of the devils is presented as something marvellous; we may recall that, according to Tasso, the epic ought to arouse delight through wonder. 66 The strength of Milton's engagement is shown by the potent double allusion to two loved authors: to the ill-meeting by moonlight of Oberon and Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream , II. I. 60 ff. (‘midnight revels’ echoes ‘moonlight revels’, while the moon, the forest, the fountain, the dance, the music, and perhaps the Indian, call to mind Shakespeare's play) and to the solemn scene in Aeneid 6. 440 ff. when Aeneas recognizes Dido again in the darkness of the Underworld like one ‘who sees or thinks he sees’ ( videt aut vidisse putat ) the moon rising among the clouds at the month's beginning. Allusion is never a figure of stability, since the relationship between the texts can always be reconfigured. We can say, if we like, that, by evoking them in this context, Milton is in part associating Virgil and Shakespeare with the dangerous glamour of Satan, but the beauty of their writings is fully savoured and reproduced (the peasant, ‘belated’ in a secondary sense perhaps as belonging to the literary past, feels joy as well as fear). 67 The similes, rather than establishing fixed correspondences (Satan is like Dido or whatever), colour our sense of the action in just such complex ways.

Paradise Lost could not have been written without Milton's profound knowledge of ancient epic; but it is a modern poem, in no sense a pastiche of the classical. This is partly because it reflects so many contemporary concerns and incorporates (perhaps unexpectedly) so much material from the modern world, partly because the biblical subject matter brings with it a matching range of biblical styles to complement the classical and at times to conflict with it (one could contrast Vida's neo-Latin Christiad (1527), wholly Virgilian in diction, where there is no stylistic pressure from the Bible). Much of the prestige of the epic has subsequently migrated to the novel. When the two forms are contrasted, epic (bad) is usually characterized as ancient, authoritarian, teleological, backward-looking, objective, religious, univocal, and aristocratic, novel (good) as modern, democratic, anti-teleological, subjective, secular, dialogic, bourgeois. Paradise Lost clearly cuts across a number of these categories. For Hegel, whose Aesthetics plots the supposedly progressive unfolding of Geist in different literary forms (first epic, then tragedy, then lyric), epic and modernity are at odds; epic ‘presents what is itself objective in its objectivity’ (inevitably its ‘original and unsurpassed perfection’ is found in Greece), and Milton errs in incorporating didactic and lyric features that conflict with this objectivity; 68 the ‘un-epic’ interiority is also evident in Satan's solipsistic involutions. According to Bakhtin, ‘absolute conclusiveness and closedness is the outstanding feature of the temporally valorized epic past’. 69 In one sense Paradise Lost might seem the perfect illustration: nothing could be further in the past or more finished and separate from us than Eden. But the drive to origination and closedness is matched by a counter-movement that seeks to address an open-ended present and brings back into the poem the multiple contingencies of history, contingencies that press upon the poet and his wayfaring readers for whom nothing is yet finished (Bahktin's epic, by contrast, lacks ‘any gradual, purely temporal progressions that might connect it with the present’). 70 In Linda Gregerson's words, ‘inspiration in Paradise Lost is patently plural, mediated, incomplete’; part of the poem's essential truthfulness is that it acknowledges its own fallen status, while pointing, with great sensuousness, towards a felicity that is strictly beyond our ken. 71 An epic that adopts a teleological structure more all-encompassing even than the Virgilian trajectory from Troy to a Roman imperium sine fine also ends with the ‘wandering steps and slow’ of Adam and Eve as they enter our world of time and change and choice (where ‘wandering’ is the key word for the anti-teleological tendencies of romance). 72 The intertextual fecundities of a poem which is a sort of compendium of European genres mean that a vast number of voices (though organized into a coherent whole) speak from within its polyphony; fragments of other texts are everywhere, bringing with them their own complications (the metamorphic Ovid, for example, alongside the end-directed Virgil). 73 All this connects with Milton's intense commitment to free will and readerly freedom, which produces a corresponding dialogism in his epic. In viii. 595–614 Adam, rebuked by Raphael for excessive uxoriousness, responds with a moving expression of his experience in loving Eve. In ix. 205–385 Eve uses arguments not unlike those advanced in Areopagitica to answer Adam's objections to her going out alone (there can be no sin in her doing so, since she has not yet fallen). In both instances critics divide between those for whom the issue of authority is clear cut—Raphael in the first case, Adam in the second—and those who think that Milton, of the devil's party but without knowing it, unconsciously undermines that authority. But in both cases it is better to see designed and genuine dialogue, with the arguments finely balanced; it is not the poet's business to tell fit readers what to think but to encourage them in the responsibility to think for themselves, through an educative process which has the capacity ‘to repair the ruins of our first parents’ ( Of Education; CPW , i. 366–7). 74 Learning through dialogue is central to Milton's epic, ‘a poem directed at the spiritual discipline of his countrymen’. 75

Milton's achievement in making an epic out of one of the West's major myths was of European scope and vision. The emphasis of our new historicists on the particular and the local risks making the early modern period seem more parochial than it is. The parochialism is rather ours; the dislodgement of Milton hailed by Dr Leavis (unlikely ever to be a friend of epic) was conducted in the name of an Englishness (not altogether convincingly associated with Shakespeare) that is rather easily refigured as a form of little Englandism. Milton's multilingual dexterity, with its ‘intensely imaged multicultural fusings of perception’, 76 makes him in some ways a more exemplary figure for our current needs even than Shakespeare (his only equal in the poetic handling of the English language). Felipe Fernaéndez-Armesto asks ‘what might winkle most Britons out of their bleak, dim, monoglot little worlds’; 77 could restoring Paradise Lost to a central position in the curriculum be the start of an answer?

I would like to thank Colin Burrow, John Hale, David Hopkins, and Liz Prettejohn for help, advice, and encouragement.

Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works , ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford, 2005), i. 267 (cited in text as Lives of the Poets ). Throughout this chapter I have modernized spelling and punctuation in all citations.

See Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton's History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991), 189–90.

William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge, 2005), 1–6.

Darbishire, 73. In view of Milton's insistence on the importance of sunshine, some have argued that Phillips must be mistaken, and that the period should rather be from spring to autumn.

J. Richardson, Father and Son, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost (1734; facsimile repr. New York, 1973), 114.

Selected Essays of John Dryden , ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1926), i. 154 (Dryden is here closely echoing the French critic René Rapin; see Rapin's Reflexions on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie, Containing the Necessary, Rational, and Universal Rules for Epic, Dramatic, and other Sorts of Poetry , trans. Thomas Rymer (1674), 72) ; Johnson, Lives of the Poets , 282. Another crucial text for the period's view of epic is Reneé Le Bossu's Traité du poème épique (1675) .

Friedrich Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters , ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford, 1967), 57.

For Milton and the classics see Davis P. Harding, The Club of Hercules: Studies in the Classical Background of Paradise Lost (Urbana, Ill., 1962) ; Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (London and Sydney, 1986; 2nd edn., Bristol, 2002); Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993) ; André Verbart, Fellowship in Paradise Lost: Vergil, Milton, Wordsworth (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga., 1995) , with a useful appendix of Virgilian parallels.

Essays of John Dryden , ed. Ker, ii. 165 (from Dedication of the Aeneis ); cf. ii. 29 from A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire : ‘As for Mr. Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not that of an Heroic Poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and his human persons are but two.’ It is true that the opportunistic statements in Dryden's prose are not always at one with his deeper beliefs reflected in his own poetic practice. According to Richardson ( Notes and Remarks , 119–20), sent Paradise Lost by the Earl of Dorset, Dryden averred ‘This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too’; the story has been doubted, but it is still interesting that this view should have been attributed to Dryden.

At British tragedies plot 24 (p. 571) Milton writes: ‘A heroical poem may be founded somewhere in Alfred's reign, especially at his issuing out of Edelingsey on the Danes; whose actions are well like those of Ulysses.’

Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, 1983), 270.

‘Bards’ in CPW , iv/i. 584 for vates should surely rather be ‘prophets’, since the examples given are Teiresias and Phineus, and Homer is conspicuous by his absence.

See further David Loewenstein, ‘Milton and the Poetics of Defense’, and James Grantham Turner, ‘The Poetics of Engagement’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (eds.), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose (Cambridge, 1990), 171–92, 257–75.

The argument of this paragraph owes much to a lecture given by Blair Worden at the University of Bristol in 2007.

Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates , 250–1; Blair Worden, ‘Milton's Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven’, in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1990), 225–45; for an opposing view see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999) .

The evidence is set out in full in J. R. Mason, ‘To Milton through Dryden and Pope’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1987) .

Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge, 1997), 57–8.

Lewis Theobald, the editor of Shakespeare, was probably right to suggest that Bentley is covertly criticizing Milton, not really correcting him; see Milton 1732–1801: The Critical Heritage , ed. John T. Shawcross (London and Boston, 1972), 66.

Cited in Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing , 77.

The only real precedent is Dennis's hostile account of Blackmore's Prince Arthur: Remarks on a book, entitled Prince Arthur, an Heroic Poem, with some several general critical observations, and several new remarks upon Virgil (1696), in The Critical Works of John Dennis , ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, 1939), i. 46–144.

Milton: The Critical Heritage , ed. John T. Shawcross (1970), 251. This volume contains the full text of Addison's papers (pp. 147–220) . Hereafter cited as Shawcross.

It will be clear that I reject any idea of Addison as ‘perversely influential’ ( Mindele Anne Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to Paradise Lost (Lexington, Ky., 1994), 110) or an exemplar of ‘the malign legacy of eighteenth-century scholarship’ in general ( Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton's English’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), A Companion to Milton (Oxford, 2001), 90–106 at 90) .

F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1969), 43–4; Shawcross, 220.

‘The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version’, in C. S. Lewis: Selected Literary Essays , ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge, 1969), 126–45.

Peri Hypsous ( On the Sublime ), 9. 9; since the 18th c. the passage has been regarded by some, with insufficient justification, as a later addition. For Longinus and Milton (though unduly privileging the political aspect) see Annabel M. Patterson, Reading between the Lines (Madison, 1993), 256–72.

Inaugural Lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Times Literary Supplement , 25 Feb. 2005, p. 13.

So e.g. Tasso; see Torquato Tasso: Discourses on the Heroic Poem , ed. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford, 1973), 17.

See Judith A. Kates, Tasso and Milton: The Problem of Christian Epic (London and Toronto, 1983) ; Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic , especially chs. 5–7, 12. Addison knows that Milton frequently echoes Tasso, but does not give instances, partly because he regards Tasso as inferior to Milton and thus not ‘a sufficient voucher’, and partly because Tasso is of less interest to his readers than the classical poets (Shawcross, 220).

The twelve-book format is Virgilian; the suggestion (made by the present author among others) that the earlier version was designed to bring to mind the Republican Lucan is problematical, since the Pharsalia is in ten books only because it was unfinished—structural symmetry may have been the issue.

Shawcross, 150. Aristotle is talking about tragedy, but he uses the Homeric poems to illustrate unity of plot.

Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland, Ohio and London, 1970), 159.

For the early modern debate about the machines in modern (Christian) poetry see Dryden's ‘A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ ( Essays , ii. 30–7), with the notes in The Poems of John Dryden , ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 5 vols. (Harlow, 1995–2005), iii. 339–48; Tom Mason, ‘A Noble Poem of the Epique Kind? Palamon and Arcite : Neoclassic Theory and Poetical Experience’, in Michael Kenneally, Holger Klein, and Wolfgang Zach (eds.), Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism (Tübingen, 2001), 181–91.

Shawcross, 151–4. Cf. the Richardsons at viii. 653 on the narrative of the Fall: ‘Now the heart is called upon, every line is important to us, and cries aloud “Thou art the man”.’

Shawcross, 166; for a defence of this view see Hideyuki Shitaka, Milton's Idea of the Son in the Shaping of ‘Paradise Lost’ as a Christian Epic (Tokyo, 1996) . Contrast the Richardsons, Notes and Remarks , p. clxvi (misprint for cxlvi): ‘'tis Adam, Adam, the first, the representative of Human Race’.

See Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic , ch. 5 ; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic , esp. 438–67. The comparatively lower status of the Pharsalia in the period means that Milton does not signal his indebtedness in obvious programmatic ways, as with Homer and Virgil.

Wittreich, Romantics on Milton , 389, 244. An emphasis on Satan long pre-dates the Romantics. For example, for John Dennis ‘the most delightful and most admirable part of the sublimest of all our poets is that which relates the rebellion and fall of these evil angels’, and ‘the Devil is properly his hero, because he bests the better’ (Shawcross, 112, 129). For Hugh Blair (1759–60) Satan is ‘the best drawn character in the poem’, while for Daniel Webb (1762) its ‘principal beauties’ are ‘thrown on the person of Satan’ ( Shawcross, Milton 1732–1801, 246, 256) .

David Reid, The Humanism of Milton's Paradise Lost (Edinburgh, 1993), 127, 80. Johnson ascribes to Milton himself the Satanic qualities of ‘an envious hatred of greatness’ and ‘pride disdainful of superiority’ ( Lives of the Poets , 276) .

On Eve's heroism see Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Milton On Women—Yet Again’, in Sally Minoghue (ed.), Problems for Feminist Criticism (London and New York, 1990), 46–69.

Tasso: Discourses , 48–9; Burrow, Epic Romance , 84–5.

David Quint, ‘Recent Studies in the English Renaissance’, Studies in English Literature, 38 (1998), 173–205 at 186.

Kates, Tasso and Milton , 156.

Shawcross, 156; for the section on style, 158–62.

Tasso: Discourses , 66.

‘On Imitation’, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism , ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford, 1999), 157. For Daniel's reply, and the possible political entailments of the dispute, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992) , ch. 1 .

Preface to Annus Mirabilis , in Essays , i. 12; for this ‘heroic’ poem Dryden uses quatrains with alternate rhymes, after the example of Davenant's Gondibert . On the Republican side Lucy Hutchinson employs rhyming couplets for her biblical poem (or epic?) on the book of Genesis, Order and Disorder , subtitled ‘Meditations upon the Creation and the Fall’ and composed at about the same time as Paradise Lost .

Leigh Hunt gives an excellent example ( Wittreich, Romantics on Milton , 446) .

‘Milton II’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot , ed. Frank Kermode (1975), 273, 271.

See F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton's Verse (Oxford, 1954) .

See John K. Hale, Milton's Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge, 1997), 109–10.

FPL, 13–23; Thomas N. Corns, Milton's Language (Oxford, 1990) ; Corns, Regaining ‘Paradise Lost’ (Harlow, 1994) . On the style C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), 40–61 and Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (1963) remain fundamental. For Latinisms see Verbart, Fellowship in Paradise Lost , 5–28; Hale, Milton's Languages ; Kenneth Haynes, English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford, 2003) .

John Carey and Alastair Fowler, The Poems of Milton (Harlow, 1968), 433; in FPL Fowler modifies this sentence to ‘the most direct of secondary epics’ (p. 17) .

In his note on Iliad 2. 552 Pope observes that Milton imitates the lowness (offensive to ‘a modern critic’) of some of Homer's similes: ‘Milton, who was a close imitator of our author, has often copied him in these humble comparisons.’

Ricks, Milton's Grand Style , 90.

Tasso: Discourses , 137; Tasso also observes (pp. 84, 191) that Homer combines all three styles (high, middle, low).

Milton's Languages , p. xi.

Milton's Languages , 14.

See Verbart, Fellowship in Paradise Lost , 16–19.

On ‘ruin’ in 1. 46 the Richardsons comment: ‘Milton … chooses to use words in the most ancient and learned sense; and thus “ruin” includes the idea of rushing with violence, noise, tumult, and velocity.’ On ‘rapture’ see Rachel Falconer, Orpheus Dis(re)membered: Milton and the Myth of the Poet-Hero (Sheffield, 1996), 131–2; John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford, 1990), 236–9.

Prince, The Italian Element in Milton's Verse , 123.

Richardsons, Notes and Remarks , p. cxliv (Coleridge was so struck by these words that he made them, literally, his own (Wittreich, Romantics on Milton , 159)).

A good introduction to current approaches is Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge, 1995), 245–59 (with bibliography at 245 n. 19).

Wittreich, Romantics on Milton , 225.

Cf. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement , trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1952), 178 ( §49): ‘the imagination … stirs up a crowd of sensations and secondary representations for which no expression can be found’.

Critique of Judgement , 94–101 ( §§25–6).

Tasso: Discourses , 15–17.

See John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York, 1983), 140–3.

Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art , ed. T. M. Knox, ii (Oxford, 1975), 1037, 1094, 1075–9, 1109.

M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays , trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981) , 16. It is doubtful how far Bakhtin's unsupported assertions apply even to classical epic; see R. Bracht Branham (ed.), Bakhtin and the Classics (Evanston, Ill., 2002) , pt. 2: ‘Bakhtin on Homer’.

Reformation of the Subject , 225.

For the complex entanglements of epic and romance see Burrow, Epic Romance , and David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, 1993) , esp. ch 7 .

See e.g. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘The Genres of Paradise Lost ’, in Dennis Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton , 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1999), 113–29.

For the reader in Milton see Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1994) ; Tilottama Rajan, ‘The Other Reading: Transactional Epic in Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth’, in Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding (eds.), Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism (Cambridge 1994), 20–46.

Cedric C. Brown, ‘Great Senates and Godly Education: Politics and Cultural Renewal in Some Preand Post-Revolutionary Texts of Milton’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995), 43–60 at 58.

Hale, Milton's Languages , 40.

Times Higher Education Supplement , 13 Oct. 2006, p. 13.

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Paradise Lost

John Milton

Literature Notes
Major Themes in Paradise Lost
Poem Summary
About Paradise Lost
Character List
Summary and Analysis
Character Analysis
Character Map
John Milton Biography
Critical Essays
Milton's Universe
Milton's Grand Style
Full Glossary for Paradise Lost
Essay Questions
Practice Projects
Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Major Themes in Paradise Lost

Introduction

Modern criticism of Paradise Lost has taken many different views of Milton's ideas in the poem. One problem is that Paradise Lost is almost militantly Christian in an age that now seeks out diverse viewpoints and admires the man who stands forth against the accepted view. Milton's religious views reflect the time in which he lived and the church to which he belonged. He was not always completely orthodox in his ideas, but he was devout. His purpose or theme in Paradise Lost is relatively easy to see, if not to accept.

Milton begins Paradise Lost by saying that he will sing, "Of Man's First Disobedience" (I, 1) so that he can "assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men" (I, 25-26). The purpose or theme of Paradise Lost then is religious and has three parts: 1) disobedience, 2) Eternal Providence, and 3) justification of God to men. Frequently, discussions of Paradise Lost center on the latter of these three to the exclusion of the first two. And, just as frequently, readers and those casually acquainted with Paradise Lost misunderstand what Milton means by the word justify , assuming that Milton is rather arrogantly asserting that God's actions and motives seem so arbitrary that they require vindication and explanation.

However, Milton's idea of justification is not as arrogant as many readers think. Milton does not use the word justification in its modern sense of proving that an action is or was proper. Such a reading of justify would mean that Milton is taking it upon himself to explain the propriety of God's actions — a presumptuous undertaking when one is dealing with any deity. Rather, Milton uses justify in the sense of showing the justice that underlies an action. Milton wishes to show that the fall, death, and salvation are all acts of a just God. To understand the theme of Paradise Lost then, a reader does not have to accept Milton's ideas as a vindication of God's actions; rather the reader needs to understand the idea of justice that lies behind the actions.

Disobedience

The first part of Milton's argument hinges on the word disobedience and its opposite, obedience . The universe that Milton imagined with Heaven at the top, Hell at the bottom, and Earth in between is a hierarchical place. God literally sits on a throne at the top of Heaven. Angels are arranged in groups according to their proximity to God. On Earth, Adam is superior to Eve; humans rule over animals. Even in Hell, Satan sits on a throne, higher than the other demons.

This hierarchical arrangement by Milton is not simply happenstance. The worldview of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Restoration was that all of creation was arranged in various hierarchies. The proper way of the world was for inferiors to obey superiors because superiors were, well, superior. A king was king not because he was chosen but because he was superior to his subjects. It was, therefore, not just proper to obey the king; it was morally required. Conversely, if the king proved unfit or not superior to his subjects, it was morally improper to obey him and revolution could be justified.

God, being God, was by definition superior to every other thing in the universe and should always be obeyed. In Paradise Lost, God places one prohibition on Adam and Eve — not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The prohibition is not so much a matter of the fruit of the tree as it is obeying God's ordinance. The proper running of the universe requires the obedience of inferiors to their superiors. By not obeying God's rule, Adam and Eve bring calamity into their lives and the lives of all mankind.

The significance of obedience to superiors is not just a matter of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge; it is a major subject throughout the poem. Satan's rebellion because of jealousy is the first great act of disobedience and commences all that happens in the epic. When Abdiel stands up to Satan in Book V, Abdiel says that God created the angels "in their bright degrees" (838) and adds "His laws our laws" (844). Abdiel's point is that Satan's rebellion because of the Son is wrong because Satan is disobeying a decree of his obvious superior. Satan has no answer to this point except sophistic rigmarole.

Further instances of the crucial importance of both hierarchy and obedience occur in both large and small matters. The deference with which Adam greets Raphael shows the human accepting his position in regard to the angel. The image is one of the proper manners between inferior and superior. Eve's normal attitude toward Adam reflects the same relationship.

The crucial moment in the poem results from disobedience and a breakdown of hierarchy. Eve argues with Adam about whether they should work together or apart, and Adam gives in to her. The problem here lies with both humans. Eve should not argue with her superior, Adam, but likewise, Adam, should not yield his authority to his inferior, Eve.

When Eve eats the fruit, one of her first thoughts is that the fruit "may render me more equal" (IX, 823) to which she quickly adds, "for inferior who is free?" (IX, 826). Her reasoning, from Milton's point of view, is incorrect. Freedom comes precisely from recognizing one's place in the grand scheme and obeying the dictates of that position. By disobeying God, Eve has gained neither equality nor freedom; she has instead lost Paradise and brought sin and death into the world.

Likewise, when Adam also eats the fruit, he disobeys God. Further, he disobeys by knowingly putting Eve ahead of God. Disobedience and disruption of the correct order result in sin and death.

Finally, in the last two books of the epic, Milton shows example after example of people who ignore the responsibilities they have and try to either raise themselves above God or disobey God's commands. The result is always the same — destruction.

The first part of Milton's purpose in Paradise Lost then is to show that disobedience leads to a breakdown of hierarchical or social order with disastrous consequences. Some have argued that Milton puts himself in a contradictory position in Paradise Lost , since he supported the overthrow of Charles I. In his political writings, Milton makes it clear that obeying an inferior is equally as bad as disobeying a superior. In the case of a king, the people must determine if the king is truly their superior or not. Thus, Milton justifies his position toward Charles and toward God.

Eternal Providence

Milton's theme in Paradise Lost , however, does not end with the idea of disobedience. Milton says that he will also "assert Eternal Providence." If Man had never disobeyed God, death would never have entered the world and Man would have become a kind of lesser angel. Because Adam and Eve gave in to temptation and disobeyed God, they provided the opportunity for God to show love, mercy, and grace so that ultimately the fall produces a greater good than would have happened otherwise. This is the argument about the fall called felix culpa or "happy fault."

The general reasoning is that God created Man after the rebellion of Satan. His stated purpose is to show Satan that the rebellious angels will not be missed, that God can create new beings as he sees fit. God gives Man a free will, but at the same time, God being God, knows what Man will do because of free will. Over and over in Paradise Lost , God says that Man has free will, that God knows Man will yield to Satan's temptation, but that he (God) is not the cause of that yielding; He simply knows that it will occur.

This point is theologically tricky. In many ways, it makes God seem like a cosmic prig. He knows what Man will do, but he does nothing to stop him because somehow that would be against the rules. He could send Raphael with a more explicit warning; he could tell Gabriel and the other guards where Satan will enter Eden; he could seal Satan up in Hell immediately. He could do a number of things to prevent the fall, but he does nothing.

From the standpoint of fictional drama, a reader may be correct in faulting God for the fall of Adam and Eve. From a theological / philosophical standpoint, God must not act. If Man truly has free will, he must be allowed to exercise it. Because of free will then, Adam and Eve disobey God and pervert the natural hierarchy. Death is the result, and Death could be the end of the story if Paradise Lost were a tragedy.

Justification of God's Ways

Eternal Providence moves the story to a different level. Death must come into the world, but the Son steps forward with the offer to sacrifice himself to Death in order to defeat Death. Through the Son, God is able to temper divine justice with mercy, grace, and salvation. Without the fall, this divine love would never have been demonstrated. Because Adam and Eve disobeyed God, mercy, grace, and salvation occur through God's love, and all Mankind, by obeying God, can achieve salvation. The fall actually produces a new and higher love from God to Man.

This idea then is the final point of Milton's theme — the sacrifice of the Son which overcomes Death gives Man the chance to achieve salvation even though, through the sin of Adam and Eve, all men are sinful. As Adam says, "O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good" (XII, 469-471). The fall of Man, then, turns evil into good, and that fact shows the justice of God's actions, or in Milton's terms, "justifies the ways of God to men."

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Paradise Lost

John milton, everything you need for every book you read..

Paradise Lost is about the fall of humanity and the rebellion of Satan and his angels, so the plot and conflict almost entirely come from acts of revolt against the hierarchy of God ’s universe. The “Fall” comes when Satan grows jealous of God honoring the Son so highly. Satan then convinces a third of Heaven’s angels to rebel with him, claiming that they should be honored as gods and not have to worship God and his Son. This leads to a civil war in Heaven, with the rebels eventually being defeated and cast into Hell. In his bitterness Satan plots to corrupt humanity, who are then innocent, and in this second rebellion he uses fraud and disobedience instead of open revolt. The central conflict and subject of the poem then becomes Adam and Eve disobeying God by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge , which God had forbidden. This single act of disobedience leads to the “Fall of Man,” and the Christian explanation for all the suffering and evil in the world.

In Milton’s universe there is no question about punishment for disobedience and revolt. Even though God shows mercy in sending his Son to redeem humanity and bring good out of the Fall, he still causes endless misery for the sake of one piece of fruit, and he shows no mercy at all in punishing Satan. The order of the universe and God’s supremacy must be maintained, and when this hierarchy is upset the result is always pain and punishment.

Disobedience and Revolt ThemeTracker

Disobedience and Revolt Quotes in Paradise Lost

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing Heav’nly Muse… What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the heighth of this great argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.

Fall’n Cherub, to be weak is miserable Doing or suffering: but of this be sure, To do aught good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight, As being the contrary to his high will Whom we resist. If then his Providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labour must be to pervert that end, And out of good still to find means of evil…

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n… Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

Thus Beelzebub Pleaded his devilish counsel, first devised By Satan, and in part proposed; for whence, But from the author of all ill could spring So deep a malice, to confound the race Of mankind in one root, and earth with Hell To mingle and involve, done all to spite The great Creator? But their spite still serves His glory to augment.

If him by force he can destroy, or worse, By some false guile pervert; and shall pervert; For man will hearken to his glozing lies, And easily transgress the sole command, Sole pledge of his obedience: so will fall He and his faithless progeny: whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

Be then his love accursed, since love or hate, To me alike, it deals eternal woe. Nay cursed be thou; since against his thy will Chose freely what it now so justly rues. Me miserable! Which way shall I fly Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.

And should I at your harmless innocence Melt, as I do, yet public reason just, Honour and empire with revenge enlarged, By conquering this new world, compels me now To do what else though damned I should abhor.

Happiness in his power left free to will, Left to his own free will, his will though free, Yet mutable; whence warn him to beware He swerve not too secure: tell him withal His danger, and from whom, what enemy Late fall’n himself from Heav’n, is plotting now The fall of others from like state of bliss; By violence, no, for that shall be withstood, But by deceit and lies; this let him know, Lest wilfully transgressing he pretend Surprisal, unadmonished, unforewarned.

Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend The supple knee? ye will not, if I trust To know ye right, or if ye know yourselves Natives and sons of Heav’n possessed before By none, and if not equal all, yet free, Equally free; for orders and degrees Jar not with liberty, but well consist. Who can in reason then or right assume Monarchy over such as live by right His equals, if in power and splendour less, In freedom equal?

Unjust thou say’st Flatly unjust, to bind with laws the free, And equal over equals to let reign, One over all with unsucceeded power. Shalt thou give law to God, shalt thou dispute With him the points of liberty, who made Thee what thou art, and formed the Powers of Heav’n Such as he pleased, and circumscribed their being?

But lest his heart exalt him in the harm Already done, to have dispeopled Heav’n, My damage fondly deemed, I can repair That detriment, if such it be to lose Self-lost, and in a moment will create Another world, out of one man a race Of men innumerable, there to dwell, Not here, till by degrees of merit raised They open to themselves at length the way Up hither, under long obedience tried, And earth be changed to Heav’n, and Heav’n to earth, One Kingdom, joy and union without end.

No more of talk where God or angel guest With man, as with his friend, familiar used To sit indulgent, and with him partake Rural repast, permitting him the while Venial discourse unblamed: I now must change Those notes to tragic; foul distrust, and breach Disloyal on the part of man, revolt, And disobedience: on the part of Heav’n Now alienated, distance and distaste, Anger and just rebuke, and judgment giv’n, That brought into this world a world of woe, Sin and her shadow Death, and misery Death’s harbinger…

O foul descent! that I who erst contended With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrained Into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime, This essence to incarnate and imbrute, That to the heighth of Deity aspired… Revenge, at first though sweet, Bitter ere long back on itself recoils; Let it; I reck not, so I light well aimed, Since higher I fall short, on him who next Provokes my envy, this new favourite Of Heav’n, this man of clay, son of despite, Whom us the more to spite his Maker raised From dust: spite then with spite is best repaid.

Queen of this universe, do not believe Those rigid threats of death; ye shall not die: How should ye? by the fruit? it gives you life To knowledge. By the Threat’ner? look on me, Me who have touched and tasted, yet both live, And life more perfect have attained than Fate Meant me, by vent’ring higher than my lot. Shall that be shut to man, which to the beast Is open? or will God incense his ire For such a petty trespass, and not praise Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain Of death denounced, whatever thing death be…

What fear I then, rather what know to fear Under this ignorance of good and evil, Of God or death, of law or penalty? Here grows the cure of all, this fruit divine, Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste, Of virtue to make wise: what hinders then To reach, and feed at once both body and mind? So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe, That all was lost.

However I with thee have fixed my lot, Certain to undergo like doom; if death Consort with thee, death is to me as life; So forcible within my heart I feel The bond of nature draw me to my own, My own in thee, for what thou art is mine; Our state cannot be severed, we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.

O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear To that false worm, of whomsoever taught To counterfeit man’s voice, true in our Fall, False in promised rising; since our eyes Opened we find indeed, and find we know Both good and evil, good lost, and evil got, Bad fruit of knowledge, if this be to know…

Fair daughter, and thou son and grandchild both, High proof ye now have giv’n to be the race Of Satan (for I glory in the name, Antagonist of Heav’n’s Almighty King) Amply have merited of me, of all Th’ infernal empire, that so near Heav’n’s door Triumphal with triumphal act have met, Mine with this glorious work, and made one realm Hell and this world, one realm, one continent Of easy thoroughfare.

Adam, Heav’n’s high behest no preface needs: Sufficient that thy prayers are heard, and Death, Then due by sentence when thou didst transgress, Defeated of his seizure many days Giv’n thee of grace, wherein thou may’st repent, And one bad act with many deeds well done May’st cover: well may then thy Lord appeased Redeem thee quite from Death’s rapacious claim; But longer in this Paradise to dwell Permits not; to remove thee I am come, And send thee from the garden forth to till The ground whence thou wast taken, fitter soil.

O execrable son so to aspire Above his brethren, to himself assuming Authority usurped, from God not giv’n: He gave us only over beast, fish, fowl Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation; but man over men He made not lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free.

Christian Religion Theme in “Paradise Lost” by John Milton Essay

Introduction, age of the poem, thesis statement, book summary, works cited.

John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost is one of the most read epic poems in history (Kean 34). The poem is religious and focuses on the relationship between man and God. To be specific, the poem sheds light on how man’s fate was decided at the Garden of Eden. Precisely, this poem is a Christian poem that seeks to justify the actions of God, which may be unclear to man.

The poem has thousands of lines in the poem’s verses. The poem has been written in over twelve books, not mentioning the original ten book version that was initially written. The review of Book 1 of the poem will highlight the age of the poem. Moreover, the review will provide information about the poet and a thesis statement. A substantive summary of the book will be done with a conclusion.

This poem was published in the year 1667, but was first initialized by the poet in the 17th century (Lewalski 686). This was the first edition of the poem, which consisted of ten books. Later, the poem was redone as a second edition in the year 1674 and consisted of twelve books.

An in-depth analysis of the book reveals that the poem is ancient and was done, when the need to emphasis the validity of the Christian faith was questionable. This can be justified by the poem’s insistence in illuminating the Christian faith from a traditional point of view, particularly by focusing on God, Satan, first creations and man.

John Milton is a renowned poet, who is sometimes regarded as a polemicist. The poet was born on 9th December 1608 (Milton XI) and has written several religious and political materials in his career. Born in London, the young Milton oversaw a shift of his religious views after being abandoned by his father. This was because, the young Milton who was brought up as a staunch Catholic converted to Protestantism.

However, Milton started to write poetry in the 1630s, while undergoing his studies. Much of Milton’s poetry can be traced in the various literary materials that focus on Christian religion and politics (XIV). Until his death on 8th November 1674, the English author was known of his contribution to British partisanship, which is still a contentious issue in modern Britain.

The poetic style known as the Miltonic blank verse style is named after John Milton’s poetic style, which is still relevant in both epic poetry and contemporary poetry.

The poem Paradise Lost is an epic encounter that illuminates the significance of the disobedience of man to God. The poem’s emphasis on God, Satan, angels, and other godly creatures is of importance for man to understand God’s actions. The poem validates Christianity and offers relevance to the Christian religion.

As indicated earlier, the poem is an epic encounter of the Christian faith. The poem trends along with the story of the fall of man as a creature endowed with free will, but weak in faith. This is evidenced in the poem’s first lines, which introduce the subject of the poem. The first lines of the poem indicate the disobedience of man, the cause of the disobedience, the consequence and man’s redemption.

“Of man first disobedience/ and the fruit of that forbidden tree/ whose mortal taste brought death into the world/ and all our woe/ with loss of Eden/ till one greater man restore us….” (Milton 1-5).

The mentioning of the muses in the sixth line of the first verse is an indication that the fall of man may have been pre-planned for a greater significance in the future. A focus on the mentioning of the muses would reveal that Milton is referring to the Holy Spirit.

“Sing heavenly muse/ that on the secret top of Oreb/ or Sinai, didst inspire” (Milton 6-7)

The poet also mentions the aspects that define man’s failure in the presence of God. For example, the poet asserts his presence to hell with Satan. He refers to hell as a burning inferno, where there is chaos in the middle of nowhere. It is in the first book of the poem that the poet introduces the universe structure.

In this regard, the universe is created by God and consists of the earth, the stars, and other planets. The poet implies that the earth is beautiful to the extent that Satan is amazed by such creation, once he falls from heaven.

From the poem’s first book, the reader is introduced to the poem’s characters. Some of these characters are deeply mentioned in Holy Scriptures. An example of such is the mention of angels, archangels and Satan. It seems that the fall of man started from heavenly wrangles between God and Satan. This is attested by the poet who describes Satan as bewildered, once he is thrown out of heave and notices Beelzebub.

Together and some other angels, Satan also recounts on how they should attack God after losing in their first ordeal. In this occurrence, the disobedience of man to God is premeditated, once Satan and his counterparts want to revenge against God through man.

The poet description of Satan is that of a powerful evil that still posses some of the angelic features, such as feathers and monstrous physique. At one point, the poet describes and compares Satan’s shield to a big moon and his pear to a huge mast of a big ship. The rise and reign of evil begin at this moment when Satan summons his fellow fallen angels and counterparts and organizes them into various responsibilities.

The mentioning of the pagan deities in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament is likened by the poet to the leaders of the organized satanic angels. Such deities can be likened to the idol worshipping by the Israelites as numerously mentioned in the Old Testament.

Some of the pagan deities mentioned by Milton include the Chemos worshipped as a non-Hebrew god, soon after the Israelites came from Egypt. Another deity was Moloch popular in Syria and Jordan. Another deity was the Ashtoreth worshipped by the Phoenicians. Milton mentions a lot of deities that were part of the fallen angels.

As mentioned earlier, the fall of man may have been premeditated. However, such would not come easy considering that God had already created man. By using fraud, man could be used as the means to an end. The poet tries to show how Satan and his legions still deceive man through the greed of the material wealth.

From another perspective, the poem Paradise Lost is initialized by a focus on the beginning of the world, which was intended to be a paradise. God intention was to make the earth a paradise for his creations. However, such was lost along the way after the fall of Satan from heaven. Nonetheless, the poet tries to be truthful by using the Holy Spirit to imply his allegations as truthful.

The Holy Spirit is described as the muse, which is intended to keep the information truthful. This is revealed by Milton’s mentioning of the fallen angels by their names. This is an exemplary way of ensuring that his poem does not pass as a myth like any other epic poem with a Greek or Latin origin.

While Greek and Latin mythology focuses on heroic figures like Achilles, Milton’s story of the Paradise Lost is a journey for all mankind. Milton’s epic story is about the good against the evil, which is the most horrific battle that continues to date.

The large part of book 1 of the Paradise Lost poem is a description of the satanic character. The poet tries to explain the struggles of Satan and the eventful deception of man by Satan. At this juncture, the reader may be swayed to think that Satan is the hero of the story or the protagonist of the story. Satan whispers into the year of Eve and deceives her into eating the forbidden fruit.

The success of Satan’s deception may be likened to a character of a protagonist. Most protagonists struggle and emerge successful in their ambitions. The introduction of Adam and Eve in the story does not shift this perception that Satan might be powerful than man. This is evidenced when Satan is described not to have wavered in his evil quest. In fact, he takes pride and delight in evil rather than good.

“Falling Cherub, to be weak is miserable

Doing or suffering, but of this be sure

To do ought good never will be our task

But ever to do ill our delight…” (Milton 157- 160).

Satan becomes more optimistic of his plans, and at one point he envisions himself becoming the king in hell. Satan is powerful to understand the power of the mind. He knows that the mind can be corrupted to make a heaven out of hell or vice versa.

Nonetheless, Satan powers are unmatched to that of God. God demonstrates his immense great powers by lifting up the fallen angles from the burning inferno and unites them with Satan. God must have had a greater plan than Satan.

Perhaps, God had premeditated the fall of man and wanted to demonstrate his powers to redeem man from Satan’s evil plans. This can be evidenced by God choosing his son Jesus Christ to save man by grace. However, Satan does not seem to understand this plan and continues with his pride and thinks his intellects matches that of God.

Ironically, the poet description of Satan has certain shortcomings. The initial intent of the poet was to describe a powerful satanic force. The poet does so by using similes of the burning lake, the pandemonium, the big mast, and a hill.

“Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge/ as whom the fables name of monstrous size…” (Milton 196-197).

Such use of similes indicates that the size of Satan is relative. This description makes the reader to believe that Satan may not be that powerful, big or mysterious.

The book 1 of the poem Paradise Lost portrays Satan as a loser who was incapable of killing even a single angel in their initial heavenly battle. The poem also portrays Satan as a hero of destruction and only excels in acts that bring forth war and atrocities. In this context, mankind is advised against gong into war with Satan without God’s help.

The poet leads the readers to question their admiration of martial strength and the character of heroes who exist in literature. In so doing, the reader is prompted into understanding the virtues of the Christian faith. These Christian virtues entail being obedient, humble and patient in persevering temptations.

It is important to acknowledge that Milton’s description of Satan is not to provoke admiration from the reader. Milton does not expect empathy from the reader.

However, the poet wants the reader to notice the irony that surrounds Satan success. In fact, the poet wants the reader to understand that Satan only succeeds because God wants him to, but just for a while. It seems that Satan efforts and actions are also premeditated by another superior power, which is God.

The poet through symbolism creates the city of hell known as pandemonium, which Satan wants to perfect as hell’s capital. The city, which is made of gold, represents the worldly desires harbored by man. Nonetheless, the city is later revealed to be a sinful place that is full of confusion and disorder. This is a perfect representation of illusions of both Satan and man.

Three main themes are traceable in book 1 of the poem. The first theme is the significance of obedience to God in the Christian faith. The first book of the poem describes the disobedience of man as a succession of Satan’s rebellion against God. At one point, man is warned by angel Raphael that Satan is a threat to mankind. This depicts that obedience is a moral principle that depends on free will for its execution.

When free will is unable to counter against disobedience, mankind is doomed to continue into sin and moral degradation. The significance of disobedience to God has its own significance, since through repentance man is forgiven by God. The lack of acknowledgment of sin and repentance leads to eternal condemnation by God. To date, the significance of seeking forgiveness from God and repentance is a fundamental principle in the Christian faith.

The second theme depicted in the poem is the structure and nature of the universe. The poet gives a layout of the universe in his poem by depicting how God is positioned above all other things. In this context, heaven, hell, and earth are given various proximities in the universe. In this universal hierarchy, the poet positions various creations about God’s proximity. With each level of proximity, certain aspects of power are given to the same creations.

Above all, God is the Supreme Being of all and the creator of all other beings positioned in the universal hierarchy. God’s son Jesus Christ is amongst the top in the hierarchical commands, followed by angels and then a man and ultimately animals.

The positioning of Jesus Christ as superior to all angels prompted the rebellion of Satan and other fallen angels. In this respect, it is important to note that man can only remain obedient by respecting this hierarchy. To this very day, the Christians give allegiance to the Son Jesus Christ in respect to being obedient to God.

The final theme depicts disobedience to God as partly fortunate. After the revelation of the savior of humankind, Adam is happy and sees man’s fault as a means to a happy ending. Through the fault of man, God can show his mighty power in redeeming the sinner.

Moreover, his love is depicted to be forever unending. Such Christian values are the foundation of the Christian faith that salvation comes from the Son of God. Basically, the fall of man is a plan of God to reveal his powers and love for mankind.

Kean, Margaret. John Milton’s paradise lost: A sourcebook . New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Lewalski, K. Barbara. The life of John Milton: A critical biography . New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Print.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost, Books 1 and 2 . California: CUP Archive, 1958. Print.

Milton, John. Paradise lost: A poem, in twelve books. The author John Milton . Oxford: Oxford University, 1746, p. 1-798. Print.

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A2 English - Paradise Lost and Duchess of Malfi comparison

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

10 February 2021

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This is a highly detailed and comprehensive comparison between the famous literary texts Duchess of Malfi and Paradise Lost (especially Books 9 and 10), split into tables with both quotes and analysis for each of the six main themes: Vanity and Pride, Reason, Gender, Death and Mortality, Isolation, Ambition

The notes also come with a great selection of critical commentary and quotations which can be directly inserted into essays for AO5.

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A level English - Duchess of Malfi and Paradise Lost comparison

This is a bundle including very detailed notes on Paradise Lost as well as a large thematic comparison of Duchess of Malfi with Paradise Lost for use in A level English especially the OCR board<br /> Finally, there is a very complex 15,000 word collection of essay plans specifically tailored for exam preparation and guidance.

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Brilliant resource! Very useful for revision

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What an excellent resource helping my students with their English A-level Exams. It brings together a superb collection of key notes in the texts, demonstrating further analysis and in detail comparisons. The resource is clearly written and easy to navigate. Highly recommend this resource and other resources of the Author.

Really really great resource. Goes into excellent detail way above what is expected of an A* student at A level. Provides a complete guide and set of notes to understand whole texts and write A* essays with quotes, critical analysis and contextual detail. Could not recommend more.

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Amazing resources!!

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Very good resource for AO1 and AO5. Would have liked to see more links to context throughout (OCR is 50% AO3), as this is fairly thorough in some plans (in particular gender), but some lack specificity and detail in context. Thanks though- saved me some time!

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Thank you for your review. However, throughout my experience with A level English literature specifically the exams under OCR, although AO3 is weighted at 50% of the overall grade, in order to achieve high grades (+85%), it is necessary to be able to integrate this AO3 in a fluid and analytical way; thus it is less about your knowledge of the era (although a good knowledge is necessary) but the way in which you apply and develop these remarks. Thus in this sense, throughout my notes I have therefore intended to imbed AO3 analysis within the AO2 and AO1 I write. Nonetheless, since the notes do lack specificity in AO3, you will find that I have recently added a file within the resource (so will be accessible freely to yourself) which includes many highly relevant critical quotes with the most part having a contextual basis in their analysis. In my experience, this sort of critical quotes is highly praised by examiners since they allow students to perfectly hit AO1, AO3 and AO5 and demonstrates a breadth of knowledge and understanding. I hope this helps :)

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A2 English
A level English - Duchess of Malfi and Paradise Lost comparison. This is a bundle including very detailed notes on Paradise Lost as well as a large thematic comparison of Duchess of Malfi with Paradise Lost for use in A level English especially the OCR board<br /> Finally, there is a very complex 15,000 word collection of essay plans specifically tailored for exam preparation and guidance.
87 Paradise Lost Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
Allegory in the "Paradise Lost" by John Milton. The poem is a rendition of the fall of man as written in the Bible The author's purpose, as stated in the book, is to expound on the conflict between man and God. John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Christopher Marlow's "Dr. Faustus": Comparative Analysis.
"Paradise Lost" by John Milton
Introduction. John Milton's poem Paradise Lost is one of the most read epic poems in history (Kean 34). The poem is religious and focuses on the relationship between man and God. To be specific, the poem sheds light on how man's fate was decided at the Garden of Eden. Precisely, this poem is a Christian poem that seeks to justify the ...
A2 English
A level English - Duchess of Malfi and Paradise Lost comparison. This is a bundle including very detailed notes on Paradise Lost as well as a large thematic comparison of Duchess of Malfi with Paradise Lost for use in A level English especially the OCR board<br /> Finally, there is a very complex 15,000 word collection of essay plans specifically tailored for exam preparation and guidance.
Paradise Lost Book I, Lines 1-26 Summary & Analysis
Analysis: Lines 1-26: The Prologue and Invocation. The beginning of Paradise Lost is similar in gravity and seriousness to the book from which Milton takes much of his story: the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The Bible begins with the story of the world's creation, and Milton's epic begins in a similar vein, alluding to ...
Paradise Lost: Key Quotations
The phrase "That all was lost" crеatеs a sеnsе of finality and forbodes thе loss of innocеncе and thе еntrancе of sin into thе world. "Foul distrust, and breach. Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt, And disobedience". - Narrator, Paradise Lost Book IX, Linеs 6-8. Meaning and context.
Paradise Lost: What To Compare It To
Revision notes on Paradise Lost: What To Compare It To for the OCR A Level English Literature syllabus, written by the English Literature experts at Save My Exams. ... The second task in Component 1 is a comparative essay, and it should include an integrated comparative analysis of the relationships between texts. This means that you are ...
"Paradise Lost" and "The Duchess of Malfi" Free Essay Example
Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost, Milton shows us that ambition is the cause of madness and self-torment through his portrayal of Satan and how ambition has ruined this archangel - "But his doom reserved him more wrath; for now the though both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him" emphasises the way in which Satan's greed for power ...
Ambition
Paradise Lost - Adam, Book 9. Pre-fall. Trying to convince Eve not to leave; suppressing her ambition for freedom. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like 'Could I be one of their/flatt'ring panders, I would hang on their ears like/a horse-leech till I were full, and then drop off.', 'He should/have been Pope, but ...