On John Milton's "Paradise Lost"

From an early age, John Milton knew he was going to be a poet. He didn't know exactly what he would write, but he knew poetry was his calling. While he was a student at Christ College Cambridge, he announced his vocation to the world while performing a poem he'd written in Latin. But then there's this strange bit where it turns to English and he starts speaking himself. And right in the middle of this performance, he starts saying, "My muse, I know that you're there waiting for me and I'm coming." I don't know what I'm going to write, but I'm going to write it in English and it's going to be the greatest poem that the world has ever seen. If you can imagine what this would be like, it would be like, you know, your fourth graders up there in a chorus, you know, in Christmas carols with their classmates and all of a sudden they step forward for their solo and they start saying, "And let me tell you, I'm going to be the world's greatest poet. It's just absolutely extraordinary." That's Eric Gray. I'm a professor of English at Columbia University. Incredibly, Millen's prediction for his life came true. Decades later, he wrote Paradise Lost, unquestionably the greatest epic poem written in English. His poem is set at the very beginning of the world and by definition, everything that happens in this poem determines who we are today. It's a poem about the fall of humankind from a straighter grace to a state of fallenness and what could be more determinative of our current lives. So that's what he's trying to achieve in both taking on the epic mantle, but also in a sense, completely reinventing whatever can do. Welcome to Rit Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I'm Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world's leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Eric Gray to discuss John Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton was born in 1808. His father was a skirvener, which is to say, something like a lawyer, and made enough money to get his son John, a very good education. Milton went on to Cambridge to study there, and was extraordinarily gifted in languages. Milton studied Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Dutch. But his interest went beyond languages. He had an insatiable appetite for all kinds of knowledge. And so he was reading voraciously in everything, in the classics, in science, when he traveled to the continent. He met Galileo. He was very interested in everything. There was really no area of human knowledge that Milton was not interested in, and that he did not come conversant in. But his real love was for the classics, and specifically classical poetry. And so by the time he was at university, so in his late teens, he already knew that he wanted to be a poet. Milton was also on track to become a minister in the Anglican Church. But near the end of his academic studies, he decided against putting on the clerical collar. Milton realized how much he prized freedom of thought, and he increasingly disliked the hierarchy of the established Church. Instead, he turned his full attention to his original calling, poetry. Milton decided, if I really am going to be the greatest, I have to study. And so after he finished his education, because his father had the means to support him, Milton simply retired and lived at his father's house and spent six years doing nothing but studying in order to prepare himself for his calling as a poet. Milton spent three years studying theology, philosophy, history, literature, science, and politics. In the late 1630s, he went on the famous Grand Tour of France and Italy, where he was able to visit the places and experience the religious traditions he'd been reading about during his studies. When he returned to England, he found his country in crisis. In the 1640s and 1650s, England had a civil war. This war was both religious and political. The main dispute was over how England, Scotland, and Ireland should be governed. The war was between two parties, the royalists, who supported the monarchical rule of King Charles I, and the parliamentarians, who supported a more democratic rule. Although both parties supported Protestantism, they had competing interpretations of it. King Charles was in favor of a more ritualistic, hierarchical church, similar to the Catholic Church. The parliament had a great deal of affinity for a much more Protestant, and the Puritan non-hierarchical church. And at the same time, for a greater role in parliament, of parliament, as opposed to simple royal dictate. Milton was very much on one side. This is in a background to paradise lost. This is the four grounds to Milton's life. Milton sided with the parliamentarians. The war ended with the execution of King Charles I, the exile of his son Charles II, and the establishment of the English Commonwealth. The new government was led by a man named Oliver Cromwell, who ruled for the next 11 years until his death. At this point, Milton changed career paths again. By the time Milton undertook his position working for Oliver Cromwell and the British Commonwealth, he had published only one fairly slender book of poems in 1645, a bunch of Latin poems, and then a group of English poems, all of them extraordinarily good, but only one example of each genre. So there's one elegy in there. There's one hymn. There's several sonnets. There's one mask, which is like a play. They're all very good, but again, it's a relatively slender volume, which makes it all the more extraordinary that he gives up, or at least he postpones, what he had always known to be, is vocation, poetic vocation, in order to undertake this job and this other calling, which was to defend, as he saw, to defend the religious and political liberty. This position combined Milton's political interests with his love of languages. He wrote the public defenses of the regicide of killing the king. That was read by all of you. But a lot of it was just translating correspondence into Latin. But he didn't put his aspirations aside entirely. Even while he was working for the government, Milton was still thinking about the great poem he would write. When Milton said out to write an epic poem, he had in mind a long tradition that starts with Homer. And for Homer, epic was about the heroic actions of those who are in some sense greater than we are. Something said in the past that determines who we are today and sets a model for who we are. And that was reinforced and indeed, in a sense, changed by Homer's great successor in Latin, namely Virgil, who made his epic, the Aeneid, something that has direct historical importance. So if Homer's heroes might serve as a model for us, Virgil's hero, Aeneas, actually made us who we are because he founded, according to the epic, he founded Rome and Rome and the Roman Empire, these when Virgil was writing, and in a way this is still true for the Western world, determined the shape of our laws, our governments, and so on. But Milton doesn't just want to sit among Homer and Virgil, he wants to surpass them. And he believes the way to do this is to set his poem long before the epics of the classical world. What do we know about when he first got the kind of frame or the conception of Paradise Lawson? When did he begin working on the text itself? First he outlines all the different subjects that might be worthy of his attention. Many of them are biblical. Many of them from very minor, what we would consider minor parts of the Bible. He also considered writing about King Arthur because this was going to be the great English epic, which epic he was writing in English rather than Latin, and then he thought of Adam unparadized. That was the title that he gave it, and he outlined a five-agversion of Adam unparadized in the 1640s. So, obviously he had an idea of what it was going to be. While Milton was working for the Commonwealth, Oliver Cromwell's health was deteriorating. Towards the end of his life Cromwell was battling malaria and kidney disease. He died in 1658. After his death, the Commonwealth of England crumbled, and the royalist brought Charles II out of exile and back into London. This marked the end of the republic and the restoration of the monarchy. This also meant the end of Milton's government position. The good news is that he finally had the time to get to work on his great poem. He began working on it in 1658. In his own account, he would wake up in the morning having been inspired overnight by his muse, and call for somebody to come and write down what he was going to dictate, and dictate around 30 lines, and then spend the rest of the day waddling them down to their final form, which would be shorter. And again, the next night. And so, writing at about 15 lines a day, he eventually, with the course of six years, produces, you know, the 12 bucks, originally it was 10 bucks, but then it was redeivided to be 12 bucks that is the final call. Milton was dictating because he was blind. He went blind around 1652 while he was working for Oliver Crabwell and the Commonwealth. And so after that he had to dictate all of his works, both pros and poetry. And so what's considered the manuscript of the book One of Paradise Lost is not in Milton's hand. Let's talk about the text now. So what's the story? What is the style and form like? Well, the title Paradise Lost refers to two things because there are two plots, although closely intertwined plots in the poem. First of all it refers to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and their fall, their loss of paradise. And then it also refers to the fall of Satan and all the rebel angels out of heaven. The first story, the story of Adam and Eve is biblical, found in the book of Genesis. It describes the origins of the human race, beginning with the first two people, Adam and Eve. Billon doesn't copy the Bible's text word for word. He rewrites it and embellishes it to fit his poem. There had been some embellishments on that story before. There's a tradition of writing about the Bible and expanding on the sort of bare bones of the story's given in the Bible. And that's a very old tradition. And it flourished in Europe all the way through medieval and Renaissance literature. But there really hadn't been a retelling of the Adam and Eve story quite as detailed and quite as magnificent as Milton's. So Milton wasn't the first to retell the story of Adam and Eve, but his version of the story has had a profound impact on future retellings. I remember once being in a class electric course on the English Bible, English Transations of the Bible. The very first assignment was read the first three chapters of Genesis. And at the first class the teacher said, "Okay, who wants to tell us the story of what you just read last night, what you read last night?" A student raised his hand and he stood up and he said, "Well, Adam and Eve are in the garden and then Satan comes and says you should eat this apple and they do and they fall." Which of course is now what happens at all. There is no Satan in this story. The serpent tells them to do this. There's no mention of the devil at all. But the fact is Milton has made the story of Satan tempting Eve so familiar to English readers that you can read this young man had read the Holy Jackers of the Bible and yet he couldn't see what was in front of him, which is Satan is not mentioned. The other story, the story of Satan and the rebel angels isn't actually in the Bible at all. It's something that had grown up, it's not Milton's induction, but it had grown up over the course of centuries based on a few passages in the Hebrew Bible and then a longer passage in a correlation in the New Testament. That story has nevertheless become so ingrained, especially Milton's version, has become so ingrained that there are probably a lot of people who don't know that that story isn't in the Bible. These two stories of Adam and Eve and the fall of Satan take place simultaneously and they're woven together. What is the plot of the rest of those two stories? The story which is not Milton's invention but which he elaborates on is that there was an archangel, one of the greatest and most powerful of the angels named Lucifer, who at a certain point became jealous of God. And specifically Milton's version became jealous of the Son of God. So in Milton's version, we're introduced to the Son of God long before he is incarnated as Jesus. He sits at the right hand of his father and rules over the angels. There's a moment specifically where God says to the angels, "This is my Son and I am anointing him this day and he will rule over you." And most of the angels take this as common sense. This is the way it's always been and this is simply this celebration of the Godhead of the Son. Whereas this one angel, known, is not actually named as such in the poem but was generally known as Lucifer before his fall takes on bridge at this and calls all of his own, he rules over one third of Heaven's house and he calls them all to a secret council and says, this is an attack on us, on our liberties and therefore we are going to wage war against God because he is trying to usurp us. This is a user patient. Lucifer believed that God was acting like a tyrant and went to war against him. The war in Heaven is described and then Satan with all of his crew fall. Now he is known as Satan and they all have new names as well. Their old names in Heaven are erased and they fall into this fire pit, this gulf that God has created specifically to receive them. So he is the antagonist of the poem and yet to many readers he is also the hero of the poem. For Lucifer's character, Milton was able to draw from his own life experiences of rebellion. Milton had spent, you know, 15 years before writing, starting Paradise Lost, rebelling against a king and defending the right of oppressed subjects to rebel against the king and to or through that king because the king is trampling on their rights. Milton used Lucifer to illustrate how he and much of England felt under the monarchical rulership of King Charles I. And he puts all of his most powerful revolutionary rhetoric into the mouth of Satan and Satan's accomplices. It's extraordinarily stirring. If you ever want to start a revolution, you should quote, you shouldn't quote from God in the poem. You should quote from Satan. And the reader's challenge in the poem is to see all of this extraordinarily powerful rhetoric which in a sense is true, would be true. The defenses of liberty that Satan mouths are admirable, visibly applicable. Satan is admirable in his fight for liberty against God. In the same way Milton and the parliamentarians were admirable in their fight for liberty against Charles I. But what makes Satan such a complex and difficult character is the fact that God and Charles I have very different levels of power. Charles I can in fact restrict one's liberty. But God, because he is the ultimate authority and creator, provides liberty. Lucifer wasn't content with his role as God's favorite angel. He wanted to become God. But still, it makes the poem so much more interesting. Not only because Satan is not foolish or blatantly wrong, Satan is challenging because he is so admirable in certain ways. And his words have this ring of truth and of a stirring wisdom to them, because they are Milton's own words from his revolutionary pamphlets. And yet the challenge is to admire that, recognize that, and also be able to understand in what way Satan is wrong. It sounds like you're saying Milton's Satan was the original anti-hero, the anti-hero that we root for. That is exactly it. He's not unprecedented, but in terms of his magnitude, in terms of the challenge that he presents to the reader, yes, I think he is the original anti-hero. People think of the Satan plot, and it has had perhaps the greater influence of the two main plots in Paradise Lost. I think to readers nowadays, the real surprise is coming across the Adam and Eve plot, because Adam and Eve, we don't get much of a sense of their relationship to each other, of their life together between before the fall, or much after it, from Genesis. And Genesis gives us very little. And there's much less elaboration in the iconography and the story surrounding Adam and Eve before Milton than there is of the Satan story. Satan has appeared in other stories such as The Legend of Faust, and he took on different names, like metastophiles and B.L.s above. But Milton really breathed new life into the Adam and Eve story and helped paint a more detailed picture of their lives before the fall. The richness of the portrayal of Adam and Eve is one of the glories of the poem. And it's extraordinarily forward thinking. So just provide some background. Milton had a very unhappy marriage, his first marriage. It was based on essentially a misunderstanding. He didn't really, his wife and he did not know each other before they got married, which is not unusual. And not long after their marriage, his wife deserted him, went back to her parents. and Milton began writing a series of pamphlets about divorce. At the time, divorce was forbidden by Christian law. And Milton simply takes that on, head on, and confronts the four main verses in the New Testament that say that marriage isn't disallable and say why they should not be true. But a little bit paradoxically, what emerges from Milton's writings about divorce is one of the earliest and still the most eloquent defenses of the beauty and the importance of marriage. And the reason that we still read Milton's divorce tracks is not because of his specific, you know, analyses of biblical quotations about the legitimacy of divorce, which necessarily needs to be argued, at least not in our legal system, but because of the high ideal that he has of marriage. And really what he's saying there is, we allow divorce in case of adultery. And that is to set physical, the physical relation of marriage above the much more important spiritual relation of marriage. And by spiritually, I mean the intellectual relationship of marriage. He says marriage is a form of conversation. And if you can't have a conversation with your spouse, that is a reason to dissolve the marriage just as much as infidelity or impidence, which would both be, you know, reasons to annul or dissolve a marriage under the law. In his pamphlet on divorce, Milton looks at marriage and divorce from a new angle. At the time, it was common for people to marry out of convenience. Marriage was often a strategic move for political and/or economic reasons. But Milton proposed a new model of marriage, one that was based on love, mutual understanding, and mutual support. And that's what's represented in Adam and Eve. They have long conversations. And it's true that according to the understanding of the day and to, you know, the explicit prescriptions of the Bible, as he understood it, Eve is subordinated to Adam. Nevertheless, they interact as partners, not necessarily as equals, but as partners. There are moments of misogyny in them. But for Adam, misogyny comes only after the fall. It's a result of the fall. And a great deal of Eve's subordination is also a result of the fall. And that's simply in Genesis, where, you know, part of the curse on Eve, besides her curse on child bearing, is, you know, you will submit to your husband. But before that, the way in which they're represented, the intelligence of Eve, which is just, you know, completely different from, but just as admirable as that of Adam, is one of the glories of the Paul. Milton's story of Adam and Eve follows the arc of the story in Genesis. He shows Eve tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit. After she eats it, Adam realizes what she had done and that she will now die. Adam decides to join her. He says, "I would rather die with you than live alone in Eden, even if God should create a second Eve. Part of these shall never for my heart." And as an extraordinarily moving moment, and he takes it, and knowing what he's doing, he eats the apple. They are then judged and expelled from Eden. But then in the last two books, they are offered, and this is entirely Milton's invention, they are offered, specifically Adam is offered, a vision of what is to come, so that he will be able to have some hope as he goes forth into his new life. And in books 11 and 12, the final two books of the poem, The Archangel Michael shows or tells Adam about the whole of biblical history all the way through the rest of Genesis and through the end of the Hebrew Bible, and then up through the redemption, mumble by Jesus. And so Adam is able to understand that in some ways his fall is a happy one, or at least has a happy outcome and it leads to, in the end, the greater glory of God. What was the immediate reception of his time? And what is the life of this book after it's publishing? Paradise Lost was almost immediately recognized as being the great poem in English. There are poems in praise of it that were appended to the second edition and to later editions. There are poems by 17th century contemporaries saying, I can't believe that somebody has outstripped Homer in Virgil. Combined Homer and Virgil and Dante, they're just amazed by what they see. When Milton published Paradise Lost, he was in a precarious position. The old monarchy that he had fought against for years was now back in power because he was so outspoken in his opposition to the monarchy, Milton even feared for his life. Luckily, he still had friends in parliament who were able to speak on his behalf. Thanks to these friends and the fact that he was old and blind, the government showed him mercy. Instead of a death sentence, Milton was essentially placed under house arrest. And even those who's, in later centuries, whose political views were the opposite of Milton's, like Samuel Johnson in the 18th century, nevertheless had to recognize, did recognize, ungrudgingly, in fact, recognized the brilliance of the poem. For those whose political views aligned more with Milton's, it was more than that. It was more than just, you know, the best written poem in English. It was a source of inspiration. And so for the great romantic poets of the turn of the 19th century, starting with William Blake, but also William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and later John Keats, as well as for a host of women poets, paradise laws could very easily be seen, very rightly be seen as a feminist poem. And although criticism took a while to warm up to that idea that is to say, you know, professional scholarly criticism in the 20th and now 21st centuries took a while to warm up to that idea, I feel this is now commonly accepted and that it served as an inspiration to women. There have been arguments that where certain, you know, rebellious poets, but politically and poetically rebellious poets, could look to Satan as a model of successful individualism and rebellion, that other poets, and specifically female poets, could look to Eve as a, in a sense, even more successful and even more admirable model of individualism and, you know, finding one's own voice and expressing oneself. Paradise Lost was such a monumental text in so many ways. It was a hard act to follow. All English literature written after Paradise Lost has had to reckon in some way with its legacy. There is a common critical perception that Milton put an end to the epic in English. But in fact, Milton put an end to a number of different genres in English, because he not only did things so well, but he did them so ambitiously that there's nowhere to go from there. And Paradise Lost is perhaps the best example of that. Paradise Lost responded to classical epic by superseding it, by preceding it, by placing itself at a time prior to classical epic, and therefore, necessarily dealing with something even more primal original essential than you would find in Homer and Virgil. But where are you going to go from there? And where people went was internally. That is to say that if you were to ask, you know, many people, what is the next great epic in English literature, in English poetry after Paradise Lost, many people might say, well, words words autobiography, which is called the Prelude, which invokes Milton, you know, all the time, but instead of trying to supersede him by going, you know, beyond or trying to talk about some sort of national or even greater, some universal story, takes that bit of Milton that is very personal. That bits at the beginning of four of the 12 books of Paradise Lost, where Milton is comparing his own internal flights of fancy and difficulties and struggles to those of his characters, whether Satan or Adam and Eve, takes that and internalizes epic and makes it a matter of the self. So you could say that Milton put an end to epic, and then on the other hand, you could say that he also partly by his positive example and partly by his negative example, that is to say all that he had done, forced it to take a different route. And that, you know, the way in which poetry of the past two centuries has dwelt, you know, so not exclusively but so dominantly on private experience is a result of melting trading. Rit Large is produced by Jack Crombriant, Liza French, and Mee Zachary Davis. Script editing is by Gaelin Beebe. We get help from Fair Undo. Our theme song is by Ian Koss and our branding is by Dan Petchi. We are a member of LitHub Radio. Rit Large is a Lycium Original Production. You can find us on our website writlarge.fm. There you'll find transcripts, links to the books we discussed, and more information about today's guest. Thanks for listening. See you next time.