Life & Background
Milton was born in London in 1608 to a scrivener and composer, and was given an extraordinarily long education — St Paul's School, Christ's College Cambridge, then six further years of private study at his father's house, followed by a tour of Italy where he met Galileo under house arrest. When civil war came he put poetry aside for two decades of prose pamphleteering in the Puritan and republican cause, arguing for divorce, for press freedom in Areopagitica, and for the legitimacy of executing Charles I. He served the Commonwealth as Secretary for Foreign Tongues under Cromwell. He went completely blind by 1652. At the Restoration in 1660 he was arrested, fined, and lucky to escape execution; Paradise Lost was composed in blindness afterwards, dictated to amanuenses.
Paradise Lost
The poem opens in Hell, where Satan and the rebel angels lie defeated after their war against God. Satan rallies them, and in the council at Pandemonium they resolve on revenge — not by open war but by corrupting God's new creation. Satan journeys through Chaos to Eden and finds Adam and Eve in innocence. The angel Raphael visits to warn them, narrating the war in heaven and the creation of the world. Satan, in the form of a serpent, persuades Eve to eat the forbidden fruit; Adam, unwilling to be separated from her, eats knowingly. Judgement follows, Michael shows Adam the future of fallen humanity down to the Redemption, and the pair leave Eden hand in hand.
Milton takes the classical epic — invocation, council, catalogue, epic simile, in medias res opening — and turns it towards a Christian argument, stating the aim as justifying the ways of God to men. The verse is blank verse at a time when rhyme was expected, and its Latinate syntax, suspended clauses, and sustained periodic sentences create the 'grand style' that Arnold admired and Leavis attacked. The central critical problem remains Satan: Blake's remark that Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it, and Shelley's admiration, register how far the poem's rhetorical energy sits with the rebel, while Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin argues that seduction by Satan is precisely the reader's designed experience of the Fall.
Why Milton Matters
Paradise Lost is the standard by which English epic is measured, and Milton's blank verse became the dominant vehicle for long serious poetry through Wordsworth and beyond. His prose matters independently: Areopagitica remains a foundational argument against pre-publication censorship. He also occupies a peculiar position in criticism — venerated by the Romantics, dismissed by Eliot and Leavis in the twentieth-century 'Milton controversy', and restored by later scholarship — which makes the history of his reputation an examination topic in its own right.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- L'Allegro and Il Penseroso1631
- Comus1634
- Lycidas1638
- Areopagitica1644
- Paradise Lost1667
- Paradise Regained1671
- Samson Agonistes1671