Preface
1 Paradise Lost : Poem or “Problem”?
Two Propositions
The Laws of Poetry
Two French Critics and an English Poet on Paradise Lost
Knowing God
A Poem Divided Against Itself?
Poetry and Belief
Endnotes
2 God, Satan, and Adam
Surveying the Whole
Satan
God
Free Will
Endnotes
3 Eden
Changing Views of Milton’s Eden
Milton’s Evocations of Paradise
Adam and Eve in Eden
Eve and the Relations between the Sexes
Adam’s Dialogue with Raphael
Endnotes
4 The Fall
Eve as Narcissus?
The Conversation before Eve’s Departure
Eve as Goddess
Eve’s Temptation
Adam’s Fall
After the Fall
Endnotes
Further Reading
Editions
Biography and Reference
Criticism
Index to lines and passages from Paradise Lost
Index to main text and notes
“This lucid and entirely jargon-free guide to Paradise Lost will help any reader of the poem to find their feet, and to understand what makes it the best poem in the English language. Hopkins has one, and only one, resemblance to Milton’s Satan, which is that he can make intricate seem straight.”
Colin Burrow, Oxford University
“Where most Miltonists use Paradise Lost as a quarry for an investigation of the theological and political ideas of the period, Hopkins’ book restores the poem to where it properly belongs, the sphere of literature. It treats Paradise Lost as a great poem, indeed one of the greatest ever written, and shows what that claim means in its beautiful choice of quotations and illuminating commentary upon them, demonstrating the work’s imaginative reach, human interest, and supremely bold and varied verbal artistry. This is the best introduction to Paradise Lost there is, suitable for the intelligent sixth-former or undergraduate, or the enquiring general reader outside the academy – or indeed anyone who cares about poetry. It is also a joy to read, indeed a real page-turner – and of how many academic books can one say that?”
Charles Martindale, Bristol University
The books in this series include close readings of well known and less familiar poems, many of which can be found in the Blackwell Annotated Anthologies. Each volume provides students and interested faculty with the opportunity to discover and explore the poetry of a given period, through the eyes of an expert scholar in the field.
The series is motivated by an increasing reluctance to study poetry amongst undergraduate students, born out of feelings of alienation from the genre, and even intimidation. By enlisting the pedagogical expertise of the most esteemed critics in the field, the volumes in the Reading Poetry series aim to make poetry accessible to a diversity of readers.
Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry | Patrick Cheney, |
Penn State University | |
Reading Paradise Lost | David Hopkins, |
University of Bristol | |
Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry | Patricia Meyer Spacks, |
University of Virginia | |
Reading Romantic Poetry | Fiona Stafford, |
Oxford University | |
Reading Victorian Poetry | Richard Cronin, |
Glasgow University | |
Reading Modernist Poetry | Michael Whitworth, |
Oxford University |
Reading Shakespeare’s Poetry | Dympna Callaghan, |
Syracuse University | |
Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry | Michael Schoenfeldt, |
University of Michigan |
The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography
Barbara K. Lewalski
Paradise Lost
Edited by Barbara K. Lewalski
John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems
Edited by Stella P. Revard
John Milton Prose: Major Writings on Liberty, Politics, Religion, and Education
Edited by David Loewenstein
This edition first published 2013
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hopkins, David, 1948–
Reading Paradise lost / David Hopkins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-47100-5 (cloth)
1. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost. 2. Fall of man in literature. I. Title.
PR3562.H66 2013
821′.4–dc23
2012034394
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Rubens, Adam and Eve, c.1598–1600. Rubens House, Antwerp.
Photo © The Art Archive / Alamy.
Cover design by Design Deluxe
This book explores some of the main narrative and poetic qualities which have compelled and fascinated readers of John Milton’s Paradise Lost for more than three centuries. Designed to be readable in a single sitting, it will, I hope, appeal both to beginners seeking some initial critical orientation, and to others wishing to refresh or extend their acquaintance with Paradise Lost after, perhaps, a preliminary encounter with parts of it at school or university. It may also have some interest for more experienced readers, since, though the scale and scope of the book preclude any sustained or detailed engagement with the vast body of secondary literature on Paradise Lost, it offers an implicit contribution to some of the most enduring and vigorously contested debates about Milton’s poem.
There are already many books on Paradise Lost, from which readers will learn much of value. What, then, apart from its brevity, is distinctive about the present one? The best way of answering that question may be by way of a short account of the reception history of Milton’s poem. This account, needless to say, is given in very broad brush-strokes, and ignores numerous local exceptions and nuances. But it is, I think, true enough in its general outlines for my present purposes.
For nearly two centuries after its appearance, Paradise Lost was widely admired for the grandeur and beauty of its imaginative vision, narrative sweep, and poetic language. Milton was felt to have told a story of human and cosmic significance with a mastery that rivets the reader’s attention. His unique and challenging verse style, often employing blank-verse paragraphs of majestic compass, was thought to have successfully embraced the widest range of expressive effects, from awe-inspiring sublimity, through calm philosophical survey, to sensuously delicate description, and the intimate rendering of human speech. Milton was thought to have enriched the English language with resonances from his Latin, Greek, and Hebrew reading. He was believed to have created the definitive modern epic, subsuming and eclipsing the achievements in that genre of the great poets of classical antiquity and renaissance Italy. ‘This man,’ the poet Dryden is reported to have remarked on first reading Paradise Lost, ‘cuts us all out – and the ancients too.’
To be sure, some of Milton’s earlier readers expressed (sometimes quite severe) reservations about specific details of the design and language of Paradise Lost. And the poem’s reputation was no doubt enhanced in a general way by the fact that it was based on subject matter – the story of the Fall of Man as narrated in the Old Testament Book of Genesis – that was central to the teachings of the Christian religion which most of its readers professed. But local quibbles did not diminish the near-universal reverence in which Paradise Lost was held. Nor were the poem’s admirers limited to those who shared the particular doctrinal or political beliefs of its author. Paradise Lost gave enormous pleasure to readers of both sexes, right across the political and religious spectrum. It soon established its reputation as the single greatest non-dramatic poem in English literature.
But around the middle of the nineteenth century, things began to change. In some respects, Milton’s reputation continued to grow, and his status as (in Gordon Campbell’s phrase) ‘the national poet’ was consolidated in the publication of David Masson’s vast seven-volume biography (1859–94). But doubts began to be expressed about his greatest poem. Paradise Lost ceased to be generally regarded as a bountiful provider of rich, diverse, and awe-inspiring poetic pleasure, and started to be seen by some as a ‘problem.’ The poem’s Old Testament subject matter – which, it was thought, Milton had believed in as ‘literal’ truth – had now begun in some quarters to seem embarrassingly primitive and outmoded. How, it was asked, could Milton possibly have made a coherent and appealing narrative poem out of such a grotesquely implausible story? How could he have hoped to deal satisfactorily, in the context of a poetic narrative, with issues – such as the origins of evil, and the compatibility of human free will with divine foreknowledge and omnipotence – that had exercised, and frequently baffled, the greatest philosophers and theologians down the ages?
This mid-nineteenth-century suspicion of the poem survived into the twentieth, where it was coupled with objections to Milton’s poetic language. Whereas earlier critics had admired the variety, subtlety, and sensuous richness of Milton’s verse, it was now seen by some as monotonous, bludgeoning, pompously rhetorical, syntactically tortuous, and excessively Latinate. Milton was said to have violated the inherent character of the English language. Such charges were vigorously contested in some quarters, but some of the champions of Milton’s language were surprisingly willing to accept the nineteenth-century objections to his poem’s larger design: Milton was defended by some for the fineness of his local effects, but not for the coherence of his overall conception. In other quarters, it was conceded that admiration (or distaste) for Milton’s poem was likely to go hand-in-hand with one’s sympathy with (or hostility to) the religion which underpins it, and some of Milton’s champions were quite willing to concede that Paradise Lost would be unlikely to appeal to non-Christians – unless, that is, they were willing to read the poem manifestly against its grain.
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century objections to Paradise Lost are nowadays commonly treated as passé. And an older-style admiration for the poem was no doubt maintained by many readers throughout the twentieth-century ‘Milton controversy’: ordinary readers’ habits are often remarkably unaffected by the palace revolutions of the critical community. But the effects of twentieth-century anti-Miltonism linger on to a surprising degree, even in the work of those who would probably be shocked to find themselves associated with it.
Recently, discussion of Paradise Lost, like that of most earlier literature, has retreated within the walls of the academy, and has been primarily addressed to those studying the poem formally at school, undergraduate, or postgraduate level. Some of this discussion has continued to celebrate the poetic qualities of Paradise Lost in terms which would have been recognizable by the poet’s early admirers. But in accordance with current academic fashion, much recent writing on Milton has been less concerned with the artistic merits or demerits of the poet’s work than with the relations between that work and its ‘context,’ political, theological, and ideological. Indeed, in some quarters this has involved a turning away from Milton’s poetry altogether, in favor of the polemical and political prose which occupied much of his career. This body of work – which, the poet said,1 had involved ‘the use … but of [his] left hand’ – had contributed significantly to Milton’s high standing in Whig and republican circles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the quatercentenary year of Milton’s birth, one journalist reflected the renewed emphasis on the poet’s prose when he commented that Paradise Lost, with its copious references to ‘a theology and mythology that today are gone,’ is ‘largely empty’ for modern readers. ‘Milton the poet,’ this writer asserted, ‘was a bore and a prig.’ If he is to be admired today, it will not be for his verse but for his ‘sensational,’ and ‘majestic’ polemical writings, and particularly for his ‘explosive defence of free speech.’2 In the following year, another writer, reviewing a new biography of Milton, noted that the authors of this work had devoted three times as much space to one of Milton’s minor pamphlets than to one of his most famous shorter poems. ‘By writing so richly about the polemical prose and saying so little about the literary art,’ the reviewer suggested, the biographers had given the impression that Milton will be remembered as ‘a superior Salmatius rather than a figure who shaped English poetry for two centuries.’3
The present book is written out of three main convictions: First, that it is possible for modern readers to recapture much of the enthusiasm for the imaginative vision, narrative excitement, and poetic beauty of Paradise Lost that was felt by its earliest admirers. Second, that such an enthusiasm need be no more dependent than that of many of Milton’s early readers on any particular sympathy with the beliefs and opinions of Milton the man, or any specialized interest in the religious and ideological conflicts of the seventeenth century. Third, that, as with any great poem, understanding Paradise Lost is inseparable from enjoying it. As William Empson noted, ‘the act of knowing is itself an act of sympathising; unless you are enjoying the poetry, you cannot create it, as poetry, in your own mind.’4 The present book, accordingly, concentrates on those areas of Paradise Lost – the depictions of Satan and God, the descriptions of Adam and Eve’s life together in Eden, the portrayal of the events leading to the Fall – which might, because of some of the advance publicity they have received, present obstacles to modern readers’ enjoyment, and thus understanding, of Milton’s poem. The suggestion is not that Milton’s poem is faultless, ‘for faults and defects,’ as Samuel Johnson noted, ‘every work of man must have,’ but, rather, that a critic’s first duty is to draw attention to the strengths of his subject. ‘A true critic,’ wrote Joseph Addison in one of his Spectator papers on Paradise Lost, ‘ought to dwell rather upon excellences than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.’ Such a focus, together with the need to maintain brevity, has meant that there are many important areas of Paradise Lost which receive no coverage in the present book. Nor does the book offer (except incidentally) basic handbook information about such matters as the circumstances of the poem’s composition, or the poet’s sources. The note on Further Reading gives some suggestions of books and essays which will provide such information, and which will enable readers both to develop further the issues discussed in this book, and to explore areas and aspects of the poem for which no room could be found in a study of this scale. The same note also gives offers some pointers for readers interested in pursuing some of the current concerns of Milton scholarship.
The ideas and arguments in this book have been tried out over many years in lectures and seminars at the University of Bristol. I am grateful to several generations of students, whose enthusiasm and resistance has, I hope, enabled me to refine, correct, develop, and clarify my material over the years. I am grateful to Colin Burrow, Greg Clingham, David Fairer, Charles Martindale, and Tom Mason, all of whom read the book in draft form and made useful and encouraging comments. A valuable early stimulus to my thinking about Paradise Lost was provided by J. R. Mason’s 1987 Cambridge PhD thesis, ‘To Milton through Dryden and Pope.’ James Hopkins and Eric Southworth both provided usefull help on particular points. Kate Hopkins applied her discerning editorial eye to my manuscript, and Sandra Hopkins provided detailed and searching criticism at all stages throughout the book’s gestation. Needless to say, none of them is responsible for the imperfections which remain. Emma Bennett at Wiley-Blackwell has been most supportive in bringing the project to its final published form.
All quotations from earlier sources have been modernized for readers’ convenience. In accordance with the general nature of the book, endnotes have been kept to an absolute minimum, and references are only supplied when readers might have genuine difficulty in locating the source being referred to.
Endnotes
1 In The Reason of Church Government (1642).
2 Simon Jenkins, in The Guardian, 12 December 2008.
3 Jonathan Bate, in The Times Literary Supplement, 6 March, 2009. Claudius Salmatius (Claude Saumaise) (1588–1653) was the French classical scholar to whose Defensio Regia (‘Royalist Defence’) attacking the execution of Charles I (1649), Milton responded in his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (‘Defence of the English People’) (1651).
4 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (2nd edition, London, 1947), p. 248.
I begin this short exploration of Paradise Lost with two simple propositions, which the rest of the book will be devoted to fleshing out and, I hope, substantiating. The first proposition is that Paradise Lost is a narrative poem, not a work of theology, or philosophy, or political polemic, and that it works on readers’ minds according to the laws and procedures of narrative poetry, not according to those which govern the other kinds of discourse. The second proposition is that discussion of Paradise Lost always begins to go awry when the truth of the first proposition is forgotten.
What do I mean by saying that Paradise Lost operates “according to the laws of poetry”? “Poetry,” of course, is notoriously difficult to define. When asked, “What is poetry?,” Samuel Johnson is reported to have replied: “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.”1 Elsewhere, however, Johnson ventured some more positive suggestions on the subject. When discussing, for example, some of the technical minutiae of versification employed by poets, he remarked:
Without this petty knowledge no man can be a poet; and … from the proper disposition of single sounds results that harmony that adds force to reason, and gives grace to sublimity; that shackles attention and governs passions.2
Paradise Lost