Milton's Paradise Lost

Milton's Paradise Lost
Name	Paradise Lost
Author	John Milton
Language	English
Genre	Epic poetry
Published	1667 (first edition), 1674 (second edition)
Lines	~10,000
Publisher	Samuel Simmons
Location	London

Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic poem written by John Milton and first published in 1667. It recounts the fall of Satan and the temptation of Adam and Eve leading to the Fall, framed within Milton's engagement with Christianity, Anglicanism, and English Civil War–era politics. The poem intersects with debates involving Republicanism, Monarchy of England, and 17th-century intellectuals such as Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and Galileo Galilei.

Overview and Composition

Milton composed Paradise Lost after the English Restoration during exile following the collapse of the Commonwealth of England and the return of Charles II. He worked alongside or in the milieu of figures like Oliver Cromwell, Henry Lawes, Samuel Pepys, John Dryden, and Andrew Marvell, and his blindness influenced the oral composition methods used later by poets such as Alexander Pope and William Blake. The poem was influenced by the printing and patronage networks of London, the publishing practices of Samuel Simmons, and the wider European print culture encompassing Paris, Amsterdam, and Venice.

Plot Summary

The epic opens with a council among fallen angels in Pandemonium after their defeat in a cosmic conflict against heavenly forces led by the archangel Michael and divine agents associated with God the Father and God the Son. The narrative traces Satan’s journey through the chaos past realms associated with Chaos (cosmology) and Night to the newly created Earth and the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve dwell under the care of angels such as Raphael and Uriel. Key episodes include Raphael's recounting of the heavenly War involving figures like Moloch and Belial, the deceptive temptations orchestrated by Satan culminating in the subversion of Eve and the aftermath involving exile from Eden escorted by Michael, who reveals future events including the coming of figures associated with Messiah traditions and connections to biblical narratives like the Fall of Man and the lineage leading toward Noah and Abraham.

Themes and Theology

Paradise Lost engages theological controversies linked to Protestantism, Puritanism, Calvinism, and ongoing debates about Free will, Predestination, and divine justice as articulated in Reformation disputes involving figures such as John Calvin, Martin Luther, and Richard Baxter. Milton interrogates authority in the tradition of republican thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli and James Harrington while conversing with scholastics and humanists including Thomas Aquinas and Pico della Mirandola. The poem treats Satanic rebellion in ways resonant with studies of Lucifer and angelology from Dante Alighieri’s heritage and medieval sources like Beowulf’s cosmology, yet Milton reworks these through his engagement with Biblical exegesis, Septuagint scholarship, and contemporary readings of the Book of Genesis.

Literary Style and Language

Milton employs blank verse influenced by Epic models such as Homer, Virgil, and modern epic experiments by Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto, while drawing on contemporary English predecessors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. His diction mixes Latinate syntax and classical rhetorical devices learned from his education at Christ's College, Cambridge and correspondence with scholars like Cyriacus Aneau and Salmasius critics. Milton's syntactic inversions echo usages found in Ovid and Horace, and his catalogues and epic similes reflect traditions from Homeric and Vergilian poetics as mediated through translators such as Sir Thomas North and George Chapman.

Sources and Influences

Milton drew upon a wide array of literary, theological, and historical sources: scriptural texts including the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, patristic writings such as Augustine of Hippo and John Chrysostom, medieval allegories like The Divine Comedy and Everyman (morality play), and Renaissance thinkers including Erasmus, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Petrarch. Scientific and cosmological influences include Ptolemy, Nicolaus Copernicus, and contemporaries such as Robert Hooke and Thomas Browne. Political and polemical contexts were framed by Milton's prose works—Areopagitica and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates—and engagements with critics like Pierre Du Moulin and Salmasius.

Reception and Critical Legacy

Initial reception involved readers and critics from circles including Samuel Pepys and John Dryden, with later champions and interpreters such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Harold Bloom. Paradise Lost shaped English literary education at institutions like Oxford and Cambridge and became central to curricula alongside works by Milton's contemporaries and classical authors studied by scholars such as A. E. Housman and F. R. Leavis. Twentieth-century scholarship engaged with structural and psychoanalytic approaches from academics linked to Northrop Frye, C. S. Lewis, Frank Kermode, and Helen Gardner, while feminist and postcolonial readings emerged later in dialogue with thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir and Edward Said. The poem influenced visual artists including John Martin and William Blake and composers such as Hector Berlioz and dramatists in repertories across London and New York theaters.

Category:17th-century poems