John Milton

Towering seems the term best reserved for John Milton. In English poetry, no writers except SHAKESPEARE [1] and CHAUCER [5] have exerted such a lasting and powerful influence. In Lycidas, Milton wrote what many assert is the great-est English lyrical poem; Samson Agonistes has been judged the English poetic drama closest to the tragic greatness of the ancient Greeks; and in Paradise Lost Milton created the defining English epic.In a sense, Milton is the great hinge figure, joining the Renaissance with the modern world of increasing uncertainty, which was ushered in during the political and spiritual turmoil of his lifetime. 

Having read and absorbed virtually everything that had been written in the past, Milton synthesized his scholarship of classical forms into a great contemporary epic, consciously rivaling the achievements of HOMER [3], VIRGIL [9], and DANTE [2], and he helped redefine the epic tradition from the heroic to the spiritual, shifting the epic’s emphasis to the questions of the nature of good and evil. Paradise Lost, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy, is one of the touchstone documents of Western civilization. Milton’s sublime verse and the depth and grandeur of his poetic vision have few rivals.Milton’s preparation for his great achievement began with the best possible education. His father was a successful London businessman who provided his son with private tutors and schooling in London and Cambridge. 

At the university, Milton was nicknamed the Lady of Christ’s College for his good looks and seriousness. He received his B.A. degree in 1629 and his M.A. degree in 1632, then followed his formal schooling with five years of study on his father’s estate near Windsor. Milton was fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian, and Hebrew, and he committed the Bible to memory. Before age 30, Milton had written L’Allegro and Il Penseroso (companion poetic meditations on the active and the contemplative life), the masques Arcades and Comus, and the pastoral elegy Lycidas. In 1638 Milton left England for a 15-month tour of the continent, during which he visited Florence, Rome, and Naples, and met such important figures as Galileo and the Dutch jurist and humanist Hugo Grotius. He returned to England as the conflict over royal authority pushed the nation into civil war.For the next 20 years Milton aligned himself with the Puritan radicals and played a key role in the fortunes of the parliamentary forces opposed to Charles I. 

He was at the center of his age’s political debates and controversies, writing treatises that opposed the bishops’ control of the church, favored freedom of the press, and urged the sanctioning of divorce on grounds of incompatibility. (The first of his three marriages, to Mary Powell in 1642, led to an estrangement after six weeks, although she later returned to him and gave birth to three daughters.) Under Oliver Cromwell’s rule, Milton served as Latin secretary to the Council of State, with responsibility to justify the government’s actions at home and abroad. With the Restoration, Milton’s prospects and life were threatened. 

He was briefly imprisoned, lost the greater part of his fortune, and he retired to resume the literary aspirations that had been postponed during his years of public service. By 1651 his eyesight had deteriorated into total blindness, and he depended on his daughters to assist him in his writing and reading.Milton unfairly has been tarred as a Puritan apologist and associated with inflexible fanaticism and prejudice. He is better seen as a radical freethinker whose attempt to define Christian orthodoxy is both original and controversial. Beginning with the romantics, a revisionist view of Milton has dominated criticism, in which his artistic genius is seen at war with his intentions. 

In a famous pronouncement, WILLIAM BLAKE [29] declared that “the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” SHELLEY [77], recasting Milton and Paradise Lost in his own rebellious image, goes even further by asserting that Satan is the true hero of the poem. “Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged a violation),” Shelley argued, “as to have alleged no superiority of moral value to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of Milton’s genius.” That such a skewed reading of Milton is possible at all is a testament to his artistry, which expressed his intention in Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to men” in a fair fight between the forces of good and evil. He also explored in profound ways the eternal conflict in human nature between faith and belief, and the assertion of self against unavoidable limitation.

Paradise Lost originally was conceived as a tragedy, but the theme of man-kind’s fall and redemption needed an epic of a very different kind from the classical models. In Milton’s poem, the heroic values of Homer and the nationalistic ideals of Virgil are subordinated to the grander theme of the Christian myth. In Book IX Milton defines his subject and his argument:

Not less but more heroic than the wrath 

Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued 

Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or  Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;

Or Neptune’s ire, or Juno’s, that so long 

Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea’s son:If answerable style 

I can obtain

Of my celestial 

Patroness, who deigns

Her nightly visitation unimplored,

And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires 

Easy my unpremeditated verse,

Since first this subject for heroic song

Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late,

Not sedulous by nature to indite

Wars, hitherto the only argument

Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect

With long and tedious havoc fabled knights

In battles feigned (the better fortitude Of patience and heroic martyrdom Unsung), or to describe races and games,

Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,

Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights

At joust and tournament; then marshaled feast

Served up in hall with sewers and seneschals:

The skill of artifice or office mean;Not that which justly gives heroic name 

To person or to poem.

With its staggering range of classical reference, its long, packed, and com-plexly subordinated sentences, Milton’s epic, though imitative of the grand style and dignity of his classical predecessors, aims at a different message: man’s fall and God’s divine plan of order and redemption. In Milton’s scheme, Satan is the model for the classical hero whose ego denies the divine and plunges humankind into evil and separation from the wholeness that God represents. In one of the greatest portraits of villainy ever created, the poem traces Satan’s battle with God for the souls of Adam and Eve. Although Satan’s evil is rendered with tempting conviction, there should be no mistaking whose side Milton is on, as the Christian myth is developed in a richly patterned mosaic of allusions, associations, and structural parallels. In his study of Mil-ton’s life and poetry, Douglas Bush observed: “In its texture and structure, in all its imaginative variety and power, Paradise Lost is an inexhaustible source of aesthetic pleasure of a kind unique in English poetry. And, whatever theological elements some readers may choose to ignore, the essential myth, the picture of the grandeur and misery of man, remains ‘true,’ and infinitely more noble and beautiful than anything modern literature has been able to provide. The question is not how far the poem is worthy of our attention, but how far we can make ourselves worthy of it.”

For 200 years following the publication of Paradise Lost, Milton’s talent and presence dominated literature, with his masterpiece regarded as the pinnacle of what could be achieved in writing. It would take the romantic movement and the modernists, led by T. S. ELIOT [19], to break Milton’s control over poetic language and offer an alternative epic vision. Samuel Taylor Coleridge provides a fitting judgment of Milton’s contribution to the world’s culture: “Finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal.”