Paradise Lost

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For other uses, see Paradise Lost (disambiguation).
Title Paradise Lost
The cover of the Hackett Edition, ed. David Kastan, 2005.
The cover of the 2005 Hackett Edition, with illustrations from the 1688 edition.
Author John Milton
Country England
Language English
Genre(s) Epic poem
Publisher Samuel Simmons (original)
Released 1667
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 427 (2005 textbook paperback edition)
ISBN 0872207331 (2005 paperback edition)
Title page of the first edition (1667)
Title page of the first edition (1667)

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books; a second edition followed in 1674, redivided into twelve books (mimicking the division of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification. The poem concerns the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by Lucifer and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is "to justify the ways of God to men" (l. 26) and elucidate the conflict between His eternal foresight and free will.

The main protagonist of this Protestant epic is the fallen angel, Satan. Looked at from a modern perspective it may appear to some that Milton presents Satan sympathetically, as an ambitious and proud being who defies his tyrannical creator, omnipotent God, and wages war on Heaven, only to be defeated and cast down. Indeed, William Blake, a great admirer of Milton, and illustrator of the epic poem, said of Milton that 'he was a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it'[1]. Some critics regard the character of Lucifer as a precursor of the Byronic hero.

Milton worked for Oliver Cromwell and thus wrote first-hand for the English Commonwealth. Arguably, the failed rebellion and reinstallation of the monarchy left him to explore his losses within Paradise Lost. Some critics say that he sympathized with the Satan in this work, in that both had experienced a failed cause.

The story is innovative in that it attempts to reconcile the Christian and Pagan traditions: like Shakespeare, Milton found Christian theology lacking, requiring something more. He tries to incorporate Paganism, classical Greek references and Christianity within the story. He greatly admired the classics but intended this work to surpass them.

The poem grapples with many tough theological issues, including fate, predestination, and the Trinity. As an Arianist, Milton did not believe in the Trinity, [1] but only in the Father and the Son. He presents a Father who is good but irascible and sarcastic, and a Son who is generous and optimistic. The Son serves as a "vessel" for the Father's more good-natured aspect.

Contents

[edit] Story

Lucifer, the main protagonist of Paradise Lost, as drawn by Gustave Doré.
Lucifer, the main protagonist of Paradise Lost, as drawn by Gustave Doré.

The story is divided into twelve books against Homer's twenty-four books of the Iliad and Odyssey. The longest book is Book IX, with 1189 lines and the shortest, Book VII, with 640. Each book is preceded by a summary titled "The Argument". The poem follows the epic tradition of starting in medias res (Latin for in the midst of things), the background story being told in Books V-VI.

Milton's story contains two arcs: one of Satan and another of Adam and Eve. Lucifer's story is a homage to the old epics of warfare. It begins in medias res, after Lucifer and the other rebel angels have been defeated and cast down by God into Hell. In Pandæmonium, Lucifer must employ his rhetorical ability to organize his followers; he is aided by his lieutenants Mammon and Beelzebub. At the end of the debate, Satan volunteers himself to poison the newly-created Earth. He braves the dangers of the Abyss alone in a manner reminiscent of Odysseus or Aeneas.

The other story is a fundamentally different, new kind of epic: a domestic one. Adam and Eve are presented for the first time in Christian literature as having a functional relationship while still without sin. They have passions, personalities, and sex. Satan successfully tempts Eve by preying on her vanity and tricking her with semantics, and Adam, seeing Eve has sinned, knowingly commits the same sin by also eating of the fruit. In this manner Milton portrays Adam as a heroic figure but also as a deeper sinner than Eve. They again have sex, but with a newfound lust that was previously not present. After realizing their error in consuming the "fruit" from the Tree of Knowledge, they fight. However, Eve's pleas to Adam reconcile them somewhat. Adam goes on a vision journey with an angel where he witnesses the errors of man and the great Flood, and he is saddened by the sin that they have released through the consumption of the fruit. However, he is also shown hope - the possibility of redemption - through a vision of Jesus Christ. They are then cast out of Eden and an angel adds that one may find "A paradise within thee, happier farr." They now have a more distant relationship with God, who is omnipresent but invisible (unlike the previous tangible Father in the garden of Eden).

[edit] Main characters

[edit] Satan

Satan has been seen as the story's object of admiration, and there is a point to emulating or celebrating him like a true hero. He struggles to overcome his own doubts and weaknesses, and accomplishes his goal of corrupting mankind. Satan is regarded as the most intriguing and compelling of the characters, mainly for his complexity and subtlety. In these regards, he is similar to the character of Iago in Shakespeare's Othello. Another current believes that Satan's role as the hero mimics Achilles's injured merit, Odysseus's wiles and craft, and Aeneas's journey to find a new homeland. Others claim that Milton personifies in Satan the spirit of the English Revolution; that Milton's Satan represents the honor and independence of the nation asserted in the face of an incapable government.

First known as Lucifer, he was a proud angel who failed to think of himself as equal to the other angels. The day God pronounces the Son as his successor in power, Lucifer rebels out of envy, taking with him a third of all the population of angels in Heaven. He is extremely proud and confident that he can overthrow God; his speeches are always fraudulent and deceitful. He assumes many forms during the story, which are reflective of his moral and rational degradation. First, he is a fallen angel of enormous stature; then a humble cherub; a cormorant; a toad; and finally, a serpent. He is a picture of incessant intellectual activity without the ability to think morally.

[edit] Adam and Eve

Adam and Eve, by English poet and painter William Blake (1808).
Adam and Eve, by English poet and painter William Blake (1808).

Adam is strong, intelligent and rational, made for contemplation and valor, and before the fall, as perfect as a human being could be. He is flawed however, and at times indulges in rash and irrational attitudes. His pure reason and intellect are lost as a result of the fall, and Man is never again able to converse with angels as equals (as he did with Raphael), but as one-sided (as he did with Michael after the fall). His weakness is his love for Eve. He confides to Raphael that his attraction to her is almost overwhelming – something that Adam's reason is unable to overcome. After Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge, he decides to do the same, realizing that if she is doomed, he must follow her into doom as to not lose her - even if that means disobeying God.

Eve is the mother of all mankind, inferior in rational faculties to Adam, considered to be closer to God, made for softness and "sweet attractive Grace". She only surpasses him in beauty, beauty as such she even falls in love with her own image upon seeing her reflection in a body of water (a reference to the Greek myth of Narcissus). It is her vanity that Satan taps into in order to persuade her to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, through flattery. Eve is clearly intelligent but unlike Adam she is not eager to learn, being absent from Adam and the angel Raphael's conversation in Book VIII, and Adam's visions presented by Michael in Books XI and XII. Eve does not feel it is her place to seek knowledge independently, as she prefers to have Adam teach her later. The one instance in which she deviates from this passiveness is when she goes out on her own and ends up seizing the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Some scholars may argue that it is wrong to think that Milton is denigrating women through his depiction of Eve. Through Eve, he explores the role of women in his society and the positive and important role they could offer in the divine union of marriage. At the end of the poem, after exposing their strengths and weaknesses, Adam and Eve emerge as a powerful unit, complementary in each other – not only to the reader, but to themselves. The fall serves a purpose of self-discovery, the Fortunate Fall, or felix culpa.

[edit] God

Milton's God is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent, which means that He has foreknowledge of further events, but does not predestinate – which would negate the whole idea of free will. The problem with interpreting the character of God in Paradise Lost is that he is more of a personification of abstract ideas than a real character. It is wrong to think of Him as a kindly old man or as a human father as He is ultimately unidentifiable. He is the embodiment of pure reason. He allows evils to occur, but makes good out of evil. The literary critic William Empson crystallized many reader's qualms about Milton's God in his influential book of the same name.

[edit] The Son

The Son is the manifestation of God in action, the physical connection between God the Father and his creation, together forming a complete and perfect God. He personifies love and compassion and volunteers to die for humankind in order to redeem them, showing his dedication and selflessness. Through his human form the Son will be descended from Adam, through whom all men died, but He will be a second Adam, by whom all men shall be saved. In Judgment Day, the Son will appear in the sky and have dead summoned from every corner of the world, sentence the sinners into Hell. Adam's final vision in Book XII is of the Son's sacrifice as Jesus.

[edit] Composition

Milton began writing the epic in 1658, during the last years of the English Republic. The infighting among different military and political factions that doomed the Republic may show up in the Council of Hell scenes in Book II. Although he probably finished the work by 1664, Milton did not publish till 1667 on account of the Great Plague and the Great Fire.

Milton composed the entire work while completely blind, necessitating the use of paid amanuenses. (The legend that he forced his daughters to take notation is just that.) The poet claimed that a divine spirit inspired him during the night, leaving him with verses that he would recite in the morning. It is a matter of debate whether Milton (or the inspirational spirit, if you like) cared about matters like punctuation and capitalization, though few writing at the time maintained a consistent spelling or capitalization. The 3rd Norton edition of Paradise Lost ignores the punctuation found in the surviving manuscript draft on the grounds that it was inserted by the printer, but this procedure has been challenged. Even into the mid-18th century a variety of publications included a wide array of spellings of even the same word within the same text.

[edit] Context

Influences include the Bible, Milton's own Puritan upbringing and religious perspective, Edmund Spenser, and the Roman poet Virgil.

Milton wrote the entire work with the help of secretaries and friends, notably Andrew Marvell, after losing his sight. On April 27, 1667 the blind, impoverished Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10.

Later in life, Milton wrote the much shorter Paradise Regained, charting the temptation of Christ by Satan, and the return of the possibility of paradise. This sequel has never had a reputation equal to the earlier poem.

[edit] Response and criticism

This epic has generally been considered one of the greatest works in the English language. Since it is based upon scripture, its significance in the Western canon has been thought by some to have lessened due to increasing secularism. However, this is not the general consensus, and even academics who have been labeled as secular realize the merits of the work. In William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the "voice of the devil" argues:

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

This statement became the most common reinterpretation of the work in the twentieth century, but among some critics such as C.S. Lewis and later Stanley Fish, there is no such reinterpretation. Rather, such critics would uphold the theology of Paradise Lost insofar as it conforms to the passages of Scripture on which it is based.

The latter half of the twentieth century saw the critical understanding of Milton's epic shift to a more political and philosophical focus. Rather than the Romantic conception of the Devil as the hero of the piece, it is generally accepted that Satan is presented in terms that begin classically heroic, then diminish him until he is finally reduced to a dust-eating serpent unable even to control his own body. The political angle enters into consideration in the underlying friction between Satan's conservative, hierarchical views of the universe and the contrasting "new way" of God and the Son of God as illustrated in Book III. In contemporary critical theory in other words, the main thrust of the work becomes not the perfidy or heroism of Satan, but rather the tension between classical conservative "old testament" hierarchs (evidenced in Satan's worldview, and even in that of the archangels Raphael and Gabriel), and "new testament" revolutionaries (embodied in the Son of God, Adam, and Eve) who represent a new system of universal organization based not in tradition, precedence, and unthinking habit, but in sincere and conscious acceptance of faith on the one hand, and on station chosen by ability and responsibility. Naturally, this critical mode makes much use of Milton's other works and his biography, grounding itself in his personal history as an English revolutionary and social critic.

Samuel Johnson praised the poem lavishly, but conceded that "None ever wished it longer than it is."

Paradise Lost declined in critical and popular estimation during the 20th century due to attacks by F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot, who disliked what they viewed as its stilted, unnatural language.

[edit] Iconography

The history of illustrators includes, among others, Edward Burney, Richard Westall, Francis Hayman, Bernard Lens, and John Medina. The most notable and popular illustrators include William Blake, Gustave Doré and Henry Fuseli. The tradition continues today with noted surreal/visionary artist Terrance Lindall's rendition which was published in hardcover in 1982 and which also appeared in Heavy Metal Magazine around that time. Lindall's version [2] is taught at New York University and is considered to be the twentieth century's most notable contribution to the tradition of fine art illustrations in homage to Milton's visionary genius.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Kelley, Maurice, This Great Argument (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p.122.

[edit] Selected bibliography

[edit] Online editions

Paradise Lost

Paradise Regained

[edit] In print

  • Paradise Lost Norton Critical Edition (2nd edition edited by Scott Elledge ISBN 0-393-96293-8; 3rd edition edited by Gordon Teskey ISBN 0-393-92428-9) – includes biographical, historical, and literary backgrounds, and criticism
  • Paradise Lost Penguin Classics ISBN 0-14-042439-3
  • Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained Signet Classic Poetry ISBN 0-451-52792-5
  • Hughes, Merrit Y. ed. John Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. New York, 1957.
  • Fowler, Alastair, ed. Paradise Lost 2nd Edition, Longman, London, 1998. ISBN 0-582-21518-8
  • Paradise Lost and Other Poems, Signet Classic (Penguin Group), with introduction by Edward M. Cifelli, Ph.D. and notes by Edward Le Comte. New York, 2000.

[edit] References

  • Bradford, R. Paradise Lost. Open University Press: Philadelphia, 1992.
  • Butler, George F., "Giants and Fallen Angels in Dante and Milton: The Commedia and the Gigantomachy in Paradise Lost, Modern Philology, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Feb., 1998), pp. 352-363.
  • Carey, John and Fowler, Alastair. The Poems of John Milton. London, 1971.
  • Empson, William. Milton's God Rev. ed. London, 1965.
  • Eliot, T.S. "Milton" and "A Note on the Verse of John Milton." On Poetry and Poets. London, 1957.
  • Frye, Northrop. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics. Toronto, 1965.
  • Kermode, Frank, ed. The Living Milton: Essays by Various Hands. London, 1960.
  • Lewis, C.S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London, 1942.
  • Rajan, Balachandra. Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader. London, 1947.
  • Ricks, Christopher. Milton's Grand Style. Oxford, 1963.
  • Miller, Timothy C. (Ed.) The Critical Response to John Milton's "Paradise Lost" (Critical Responses in Arts & Letters) Greenwood Publishing Group. Westport, 1997.

[edit] External links

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