John Milton's Paradise Lost

A book club I belong to undertook to read Milton’s Paradise Lost. We did this over 3 sessions, 4 books per session, which I think was a pretty good pace, probably spending 1.5-2 hrs discussing the book at each session. I was using the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Gordon Teskey, which I recommend: I think it had a good balance of source to footnotes, and the additional primary and secondary material at the end was very welcome.

To secondary material included in that edition (only some of which I read) I added a smattering of other books, youtube lectures, and podcasts. For some of these secondary sources I took no notes at all, while for others my notes are fairly ample. For the latter case, I’ve collected them into distinct documents, while for cases where the notes were very brief (often because the source’s treatment of Paradise Lost was as well) I’m including them inline here.

The notes were taken fairly haphazardly, and as usual I make no claim for their excellence or completeness. They are certainly riddled with typos and errors of citation.

For the longer pieces, I list them in roughly descending order of how much I would recommend them to someone planning to read PL who wants a bit of a guide. The shorter notes following below these are listed in no particular order.

Some of my favourite quotations across all the sources

  • Empson: “I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like the Aztec or Benin sculpture, or to come nearer home the novels of Kafka, and am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious.”
  • Empson: “the poem is good not in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in your mind when you are feeling its power.”
  • Raleigh: “There was never one of them [scholastics] who could have walked into a metaphysical bramble-bush with the blind recklessness that Milton displays.” I do think Milton’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to man” especially as it relates to God’s foreknowledge were a spectacular failure.

On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost, by Andrew Marvell (1674)

  • Short rhyming ode relating the experience of reading PL, starting with some concern that Milton would “ruin… \ The sacred truths to fable and old song” (377) but eventually ending in high praise, evoking the sort of “anxiety of influence” that Bloom attributes to Shakespeare’s power.
  • Apparently included in the 2nd edition of PL, from this same year. It also apparently has a dig on Dryden (“Such as disquiet always what is well, / And by ill imitating would excel”).

John Dryden

  • 1685: Norton Critical edition, ed Tesky, includes two short pieces from Dryden, an epigram that lauds Milton as combining the powers of Homer and Virgil (implicitly assigning him a higher rank?) and an excerpt from his “Preface to Second Miscellany”, in which he basically complains that yes Milton is great, but amongst his “elevations” he also “creeps” and it should be okay to criticize his “antiquated words… and perpetual harshness of their sound” lest we fall into “idolatry”.
  • “Sad Conclusions” Paradise Lost, John Dryden, and Political Genre abstract suggests that Dryden’s attitude towards Milton and PL changed over time, eventually resulting in his 1674 “rewrite”, The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man, author David Harper suggests that Dryden took issue with Milton’s politics and religion, and his version attempted to “neutralize the political and religious content and the radical energies inherent in Milton’s poem” and “accommodate the poem to the Restoration”.
  • It seems though that one of the chief aims of Dryden’s opera was to render Milton’s story in verse. Dryden’s effort was apparently much more successful as well, a “bestseller” even Poetry, prose and the battle for Paradise Lost.
  • Dryden also criticizes PL, in his dedication/preface to his translation of the Aeneid, which seems to have been written in 1697: “if the Devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam”.
  • “This man cuts us all out, and the Ancients too” quote that Raleigh attributes to Dryden in his Milton.

Johnson, 1779, Lives of the English Poets

  • Seems to be of mixed opinion on PL, one the one hand a fair bit of high praise for it (or at least for Milton’s powers), but also: “The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than i tis. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for isntruction, retire harassed and over-burdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions”.

Blake, 1793, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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

Shelley

1820, Preface to Prometheus Bound

  • Comparing Satan with Prometheus, Shelley argues the former is more poetical. “The character of Satan gendeners in the mind a pernicious cauistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure”.

1821, Defense of Poetry

  • “It is a mistake to suppose that he [Satan] could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and although venial in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conequest in the victor. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repetn of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed… as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And thi sbold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s genius”.

Milton, by Sir Walter Raleigh, 1915

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21677/pg21677-images.html

  • This is the origin of the quote “Satan unavoidably reminds us of Prometheus, and although there are essential differences, we are not made to feel them essential. His very situation as the fearless antagonist of Omnipotence makes him either a fool or a hero, and Milton is far indeed from permitting us to think him a fool. The nobility and greatness of his bearing are brought home to us in some half-dozen of the finest poetic passages in the world.”
  • Begins with discussion of the difficultly that “imperfection of sympathy” presents to the critic. We tend to find Shakespeare’s mind too wide or broad, but “few critics have found Milton too wide or too large for them; many have found him too narrow” (6). We know much more about Milton, indeed he reveals much of himself to us in his writing. “His lack of humour has alienated the interests of thousands… It may be admitted without hesitation that his lonely greatness rather forces admiration on us than attracts us. That unrelenting intensity; that lucidity, as clear as air and as hard as agate; that passion which burns with a consuming heat or with a blinding light in all his writings, have endeared him to none” (7).
  • “It is essential for the understanding of Milton that we should take account of the rare simplicity of his character. No subtleties; no tricks of the dramatic intellect… There is but one Milton, and he is throughout one and the same, in his life, in his prose, and in his verse” (8-9). I’m not entirely sure this is the impression I get, certainly we get a picture of development from Empson and Stevens. But that mustn’t be exactly what Raleigh is saying, since the next many pages deal with Milton’s development.
  • He was steeped in English poetry, more Spenser than Shakespeare.
  • “Milton cannot draw ugliness; it turns into beauty or majesty on his hands. Satan has a large and enthusiastic party among readers of Paradise Lost. Comus, we are told, stands for a whole array of ugly vices–riot, intemperance, gluttony, and luxury. But what a delicate monster he is, and what a ravishing lyric strain he is master of!” (29)
  • On pages 140-1 (I skipped ahead) we find one of my favourite quotes on Milton, which I think captures well a central tension underlying PL which contributes both to what makes it interesting and compelling, but also frustrating:

It ill became Milton to cast contempt on these reasonings, seeing that a whole system of them was necessary for the argument of his poem. He is so little of a philosopher that he seems hardly to be conscious of the difficulties of his own theory. Both in Paradise Lost and in the Treatise of Christian Doctrine he enlarges with much dogmatism and some arrogance on the difference between foreknowledge and foreordination. He rejects predestination decisively, but he not only does not answer, he does not even so much as mention, the difficulty that arises in attempting [141] to distinguish between what is foreordained by Omniscience and what is foreknown by Omnipotence. Pope compared some of the speeches delivered in Heaven to the arguments of a “School-divine.” The comparison does injustice to the scholastic philosophers. There was never one of them who could have walked into a metaphysical bramble-bush with the blind recklessness that Milton displays.