It only becomes better when you know the backstory of the author and the context in which it was written. John Milton was a talented diplomat who spoke multiple languages and was very well respected by his peers who admired him for his intelligence and good character. He supported a popular uprising against the incompetent king of England out of a sense idealism. The revolution was initially a success but the democratic government that should have replaced the king turned into an even more unpopular dictatorship. The monarchy was restored, most revolutionaries where executed and Milton was banished to the country side where he lived out his final years in poverty going blind due to cataracts growing in his eyes. He dictated the story of Paradise Lost to a scribe to explain how hard it is to change the word for the better, "To serve in heaven or to rule in hell" as he would put it. This was his final act of rebellion, to cast satan as a personable anti hero.
> He dictated the story of Paradise Lost to a scribe
He had many aides, including his daughters, Anne, Mary, and Deborah. If you visit the NY Public Library there’s a large painting depicting Milton dictating to one of the daughters while the other two listen in: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/66760d80-c7f1-0135.... This is a popular topic and have been painted a number of times.
In reality his relationship with his daughters was very strained, it is reported that he forced them to read to him works in languages they didn’t understand and their education was not a priority for him. From https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/16/books/unjust-were-the-way...:
He did not even bother to tell them of his forthcoming marriage to his third wife. When they heard the news from a servant, Mary replied, according to A. N. Wilson's 1983 biography, "that was no news to hear of his wedding but if she could hear of his death that was something.”
The household was volatile at best, unbearable when the girls were in full fury against their father and his new wife. Milton's daughters complained that their stepmother was a termagant. One early biographer noted that Milton suffered "the Affront and Scorn of a Wife he Lov'd."
Anne and Mary never forgave their father for whatever sins they believed he committed against them. But Deborah, the youngest, and the daughter who most resembled Milton, seems to have made peace with his memory. After his death, she even came to serve as a source for early scholars seeking information about the famous man of letters.
> It only becomes better when you know the backstory of the author and the context in which it was written
Fully agree, but I do think it’s reductionist to think that he
> cast satan as a personable anti hero
C S Lewis has a pretty scathing rebuttal of this particular theory in his “A Preface to Paradise Lost”. In particular he notes how Satan continually descends throughout the story, not only in power but literally in size.
That said, Satan’s speech to the sun that opens book 4 is incredible
Whether Satan is the hero (anti or otherwise) of Paraside Lost is hotly debated. I don't think Milton viewed it that way but plenty of English Romantics did.
Yes. Blake's line is oft-quoted: "[Milton] was of the devil's party unawares".
Stanley Fish's reading is that Milton expected that his readers' enjoyment of and/or sympathy for and/or identification with Satan would bring them to recognize that their (our) point of view is tarnished by their (our) sinful nature.
There's a good biography of Milton - "Poet of Revolution" by Nicholas McDowell. Really fascinating to see how he was educated in England ca. 1600 (e.g. having to debate in Latin, as well as write any of a variety of poetic forms in Latin and Greek).
I’m not a big lit guy but I read this. The first 10% was hard to get through due to how different Milton’s english is from my own. However I’m glad I did. It got progressively easy to read until it was as natural as anything else. What a payoff.
Never before or since have I read something where I was consistently floored by the beautiful, sometimes breathtaking, use of my native language. Some passages stay with me probably forever, like Adam’s description of Eve.
> I’m not a big lit guy but I read this. The first 10% was hard to get through due to how different Milton’s english is from my own.
I agree. Milton's English is beautiful but easily on the level of an unmodernized Shakespeare in terms of deterring a reader, who spends as much time cracking the puzzle as they do on any kind of esthetic appreciation.
As an experiment, I was trying rewriting _Paradise Lost_ in contemporary blank verse with GPT-4/Claude-2. It was OK, but what I discovered was that what really works is an alliterative verse translation! (I was then informed that it is believed that Milton may have been drawing on an Old English poem about the Fall, "Genesis A", and so this may not be an accident.)
Two example renditions of the prologue:
1. Man's first folly, the fateful fruit's taste,
From forbidden tree's tempting twig it came,
Death and doom dealt, despair in our world,
Eden erased, exalted man to mend,
Restoring realms of radiant bliss, sing,
Sacred muse, who soared on secret summits,
Oreb, Sinai, sharing whispered wisdom,
With shepherds, teaching truths to chosen kin,
Heavens and earth hewn from harrowing haze,
Sion's slopes, Siloa's silver stream,
Flowing fast by God's grand guiding hand,
Grant thy aid to my aspiring anthem,
Aiming high above Aonian heights,
Pursuing paths untried in prose or rhyme.
2. Man's fatal first taste, the forbidden fruit
Whose bitter bloom brought bale and sorrow bleak
With paradise perished, till One more mighty restores what was lost
Reclaims the radiant seats—O sacred Muse,
Who on Sinai's summit secret
And Horeb's height inspired
Chosen seers to teach the tribes since time first woke,
How heavens and earth arose from Chaos hoar,
Or if thou rather tread Sion's summit steep,
And Siloa's silvern stream that rushed thereby
Where dwelt the oracle and rock of God,
That poured forth fates—now lend thy light, that I
May soar on song's ambitious wings
Above Parnassus' peaks, pursuing lofty themes...
Great matters meet for grandest strains of lore.
Thee chiefly, thee, heart's truth, soul's purest shine,
O Spirit blest, who scorneth shrine and show
Inspire my strain; for thou, who knowest all,
Hast known since earth's first sunrise. Mighty wings
Did brood with wings outspread upon the formless void
Kindling Chaos into teeming, shaping flame;
To attain the epic theme, this lofty matter,
In hymns that hallow Heaven's eternal ways.
It takes less time than you might think to get aquatinted with older English spellings, especially if you start at the deep end with Chaucer; it’s plain sailing after. Personally I got to enjoy and prefer the absolute disregard for standard spellings, capitalisation, and punctuation, so much that I find it harder to read, e.g. Shakespeare in a modernised text. More interestingly, there’s the problem of translating or updating poetry. If the poem was written with full self-consciousness of word choice, then the meaning really is lost by “updating” it, and where the poetry is best written, the meaning will be most lost.
Reading C17 English is an investment, it gets easier with each new author. The payoff is freedom from historical provincialism. Only reading contemporary authors is like only knowing people from your home town. By the way, have you read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? It's really hard - you are basically looking up every word in the back - but it is a wonderful poem in the alliterative style.
Samuel Johnson wasn't a fan. He wrote of Paradise Lost: "Its perusal is a duty than a pleasure".
"The confusion of spirit and matter which provides the whole narration of the war of heaven fills it with incongruity. And the book in which it is related is I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased."
That would be totally expected of Johnson. He was diametrically opposed to Milton in almost every subject that mattered: literary style, politics, and theology.
In an alternate universe, I’m a Milton scholar. One of the things¹ that actually led to my not getting there was when I transferred schools and became a full English major instead of an English-Math double major. While I was the latter, I had registration priority at Pomona College as an English major even though I was enrolled up the street at Harvey Mudd. When I moved to Pitzer, I lost that priority and was bumped from the senior Milton seminar that I had hoped to be in.
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1. The other factor is my tendency to be a crappy student. Being more concerned about learning than grades (or even doing the expected work) is not a recipe for being able to get into a good humanities PhD program.
I read this for the first time last year and it far exceeded my expectations. Some tips for reading
- use something with footnotes to explain the copious literary references to earlier works
- but also don’t get hung up on the references, they’re not crucial to the story
- do try to get into the rhythm of the iambic pentameter, it really makes some of the poetic phrases shine
Even if you’re familiar with the traditional Genesis story, there will be tons of surprises, both amusing (ex. the angels inventing artillery in their war on heaven) and poignant (ex. Adam and Eve’s briefly contemplating suicide rather than bear children into a cursed world)
"Abashed the Devil stood, and saw how awful goodness is"
I heard that from the movie "The Crow" and as a huge fan of the movie I looked up _everything_ that the movie referenced. I eventually bought the book and read it through, over the course of a few days, twice.
English is not my first language, and it took me great effort, I felt dumb and ignorant throughout the whole thing, both times I read it through, but I still gleamed something from it, it's the best version of the story of the creation of hell and lucifers fall that I've read, and I loved how it didn't seem to take sides, it makes god look like kind of a malevolent dictator.
Milton is also critical to the intellectual history of certain Western ideas which we take for granted. His Aeropagetica articulates the first (at least in English) full-throated defense of free speech, and his proposal and defense of (effectively) no-fault divorce acknowledge perforce the essential equality of men and women.
(Don't be distracted by Milton's own inability to demonstrate fidelity to either ideal - especially not the second. The logical consequences of his assertions are radically modern, whether or not he fully appreciated them.)
I had the strange experience of reading all of Paradise Lost and finding it very understandable, but having the opposite experience with Aeropagetica, where I had to give up because I couldn't understand what he was saying. Prose should normally be more comprehensible than poetry, but something about the organization of Milton's prose sentences made it very difficult for me to follow.
I agree. The difficulty (in my opinion) is largely because he's writing in direct response to particular critics, and without necessarily giving a precis of their arguments. (The occasional vituperative barb - and he could be mean - is only slight relief.) He also feels compelled to drive into the ground every. single. last. objection. that anyone might have. A good critical edition can help with the former problem (and with his penchant for including long, long untranslated quotations in the many, many languages he knew), but nothing can help with the latter. Contemporaries found him hard to read, too.
If you want a short taste of Milton's verse, read sonnet 23. It'll help you to know that a) the literary reference isn't important to completely "get", b) he'd gone blind, c) his (first) wife had died from complications of childbirth, and d) this is a dream sequence.
[I tried pasting it in, but can't persuade it to format itself in a way that will be readable. Here's the link:
Seriously, read it. The last line is unbearably beautiful and sad.]
Milton also wrote poetry (well-regarded by those able to judge) in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. (Out of all of them - plus English - Hebrew was his favorite, for what that's worth.) He's is my nominee for the most formidably well-educated person in history.
Readit News
He had many aides, including his daughters, Anne, Mary, and Deborah. If you visit the NY Public Library there’s a large painting depicting Milton dictating to one of the daughters while the other two listen in: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/66760d80-c7f1-0135.... This is a popular topic and have been painted a number of times.
In reality his relationship with his daughters was very strained, it is reported that he forced them to read to him works in languages they didn’t understand and their education was not a priority for him. From https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/16/books/unjust-were-the-way...:
He did not even bother to tell them of his forthcoming marriage to his third wife. When they heard the news from a servant, Mary replied, according to A. N. Wilson's 1983 biography, "that was no news to hear of his wedding but if she could hear of his death that was something.”
The household was volatile at best, unbearable when the girls were in full fury against their father and his new wife. Milton's daughters complained that their stepmother was a termagant. One early biographer noted that Milton suffered "the Affront and Scorn of a Wife he Lov'd."
Anne and Mary never forgave their father for whatever sins they believed he committed against them. But Deborah, the youngest, and the daughter who most resembled Milton, seems to have made peace with his memory. After his death, she even came to serve as a source for early scholars seeking information about the famous man of letters.
Fully agree, but I do think it’s reductionist to think that he
> cast satan as a personable anti hero
C S Lewis has a pretty scathing rebuttal of this particular theory in his “A Preface to Paradise Lost”. In particular he notes how Satan continually descends throughout the story, not only in power but literally in size.
That said, Satan’s speech to the sun that opens book 4 is incredible
Stanley Fish's reading is that Milton expected that his readers' enjoyment of and/or sympathy for and/or identification with Satan would bring them to recognize that their (our) point of view is tarnished by their (our) sinful nature.
Quite a number fled to the American colonies, at that time starting to gain a reputation for nurturing free-thinking radicals.
Never before or since have I read something where I was consistently floored by the beautiful, sometimes breathtaking, use of my native language. Some passages stay with me probably forever, like Adam’s description of Eve.
Highly recommended.
I agree. Milton's English is beautiful but easily on the level of an unmodernized Shakespeare in terms of deterring a reader, who spends as much time cracking the puzzle as they do on any kind of esthetic appreciation.
As an experiment, I was trying rewriting _Paradise Lost_ in contemporary blank verse with GPT-4/Claude-2. It was OK, but what I discovered was that what really works is an alliterative verse translation! (I was then informed that it is believed that Milton may have been drawing on an Old English poem about the Fall, "Genesis A", and so this may not be an accident.)
Two example renditions of the prologue:
"The confusion of spirit and matter which provides the whole narration of the war of heaven fills it with incongruity. And the book in which it is related is I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased."
⸻
1. The other factor is my tendency to be a crappy student. Being more concerned about learning than grades (or even doing the expected work) is not a recipe for being able to get into a good humanities PhD program.
- use something with footnotes to explain the copious literary references to earlier works
- but also don’t get hung up on the references, they’re not crucial to the story
- do try to get into the rhythm of the iambic pentameter, it really makes some of the poetic phrases shine
Even if you’re familiar with the traditional Genesis story, there will be tons of surprises, both amusing (ex. the angels inventing artillery in their war on heaven) and poignant (ex. Adam and Eve’s briefly contemplating suicide rather than bear children into a cursed world)
I heard that from the movie "The Crow" and as a huge fan of the movie I looked up _everything_ that the movie referenced. I eventually bought the book and read it through, over the course of a few days, twice.
English is not my first language, and it took me great effort, I felt dumb and ignorant throughout the whole thing, both times I read it through, but I still gleamed something from it, it's the best version of the story of the creation of hell and lucifers fall that I've read, and I loved how it didn't seem to take sides, it makes god look like kind of a malevolent dictator.
(Don't be distracted by Milton's own inability to demonstrate fidelity to either ideal - especially not the second. The logical consequences of his assertions are radically modern, whether or not he fully appreciated them.)
[I tried pasting it in, but can't persuade it to format itself in a way that will be readable. Here's the link:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44746/sonnet-23-metho...
Seriously, read it. The last line is unbearably beautiful and sad.]
Milton also wrote poetry (well-regarded by those able to judge) in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. (Out of all of them - plus English - Hebrew was his favorite, for what that's worth.) He's is my nominee for the most formidably well-educated person in history.
It’s also mentioned in Cave’s Song of Joy.