Paradise Lost

Milton's magnum opus, the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost, was composed by the blind and impoverished Milton from 1658 to 1664 (first edition), with small but significant revisions published in 1674 (second edition). As a blind poet, Milton dictated his verse to a series of aides in his employ. It has been argued that the poem reflects his personal despair at the failure of the Revolution, yet affirms an ultimate optimism in human potential. Some literary critics have argued that Milton encoded many references to his unyielding support for the“Good Old Cause.”

On 27 April 1667,Milton sold the publication rights for Paradise Lost to publisher Samuel Simmons for £5, equivalent to approximately £7,400 income in 2008, with a further £5 to be paidif and when each print run sold out of between 1,300 and 1,500 copies. The first run was a quarto edition priced at three shillings per copy, published in August 1667, and it sold out in eighteen months.

Milton followed up the publication Paradise Lost with its sequel Paradise Regained, which was published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes in 1671. Both of these works also resonate with Milton's post-Restoration political situation. Just before his death in 1674, Milton supervised a second edition of Paradise Lost, accompanied by an explanation of“why the poem rhymes not”, and prefatory verses by Andrew Marvell. In 1673, Milton republished his 1645 Poems, as well as a collection of his letters and the Latin prolusions from his Oxford days. A 1668 edition of Paradise Lost,reported to have been Milton's personal copy,is now housedin the archives of the University of Western Ontario.

Comments on Paradise Lost

The writer and critic Samuel Johnson wrote that Paradise Lost shows off“[Milton's] peculiar power to astonish”and that“[Milton] seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others: the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful.”

Milton scholar John Leonard interpreted the“impious war”between Heaven and Hell as civil war :

Paradise Lostis,among other things,a poem about civil war.Satan raises“impious warin Heav'n”(i 43) by leading a third of the angels in revolt against God. The term“impious war”implies that civil war is impious. But Milton applauded the English people for having the courage to depose and execute King Charles I. In his poem, however, he takes the side of“Heav'n's awful Monarch'”(iv 960). Critics have long wrestled with the question of why an antimonarchist and defender of regicide should have chosen a subject that obliged him to defend monarchical authority.

The editors at the Poetry Foundation argue that Milton's criticism of the English monarchy was being directed specifically at the Stuart monarchy and not at the monarchy system in general.

In a similar vein, critic and writer C.S. Lewis argued that there was no contradiction in Milton's position in the poem since“Milton believed that God was his natural superior and that Charles Stuart was not.”Lewis interpreted the poem as a genuine Christian morality tale.

Other critics, like William Empson, view it as a more ambiguous work, with Milton's complex characterization of Satan playing a large part in that perceived ambiguity. Empson argued that“Milton deserves credit for making God wicked, since the God of Christianity is ‘a wicked God.”Leonard places Empson's interpretation“in the [Romantic interpretive] tradition of William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley.”As Blake famously wrote,“The reason Milton wrotein 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 quotation succinctly represents the way in which the 18th- and 19th-century English Romantic poets viewed Milton.