Paradise Lost
We have been studying the rival accounts of creation that are central to Western culture. In Paradise Lost (hereinafter PL), we can study Milton’s attempt to bring these two accounts together, an ambitious and remarkable attempt to fuse the Biblical and classical creation traditions, though an attempt that ultimately reveals their fundamental incompatibility. We have to appreciate the audacity of the task Milton set himself. In literary terms, his goal was to write a Christian epic. Perhaps that doesn’t sound so strange, but think of it this way—Milton was taking a literary tradition in which the major figures were Homer and Virgil and using it for Christian purposes. He was taking a form that had expressed a classical outlook and using it to express a Christian outlook. There were precedents for this: Dante, Tasso, Spenser. But Milton evidently found their attempts inadequate. His ambition was to show that Christianity could produce an epic poem worthy of direct comparison with Homer and Virgil. We see in Milton’s case the dilemma of a latecomer on the mythic scene. Homer got the first crack at shaping up his people’s myths into literary form. Virgil was already a latecomer—it’s clear from the Aeneid that he was writing with Homer in mind. Milton is even further removed from the origins of the epic—a long literary tradition is interposed between him and Homer’s epics. Milton didn’t want his epic to be merely literary. He didn’t want it to be “bookish.” This is shown by the way he rejected the subject of King Arthur for his epic—for him as an Englishman, that would have invited direct comparison with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Besides, Milton decided that the stories of King Arthur weren’t historically true. This is a very revealing fact. Milton didn’t want a purely fictional subject because a fictional subject is inevitability bookish—you have to get your knowledge of it only from books. Only a true subject offers the poet the opportunity of immediate access. Hence Milton turned to the truths of his religion for a subject for his epic poem. But that meant that fleeing books, Milton ran up against The Book, the book of all books. If you think about his dilemma, you realize the difficulty of a writer working within the Christian literary tradition. All the most important subjects have already been covered in a single authoritative text, called the Bible. Everything of importance that can be said, has been said, and by the voice of God. The Bible does not leave much room for imaginative creation on the part of man, which is indeed the message of the first 3 chapters of Genesis. The question to ask about PL is: why did Milton feel it necessary to write it? Why wasn’t the Bible enough? A further question: how could Milton do anything original? What could he add to the Biblical account of creation?
To answer these questions, you have to throw all of Milton’s concerns together. He wants to write an epic worthy to stand comparison with the classical epics; he wants to assert the validity of Christian truths; and he wants a subject to which he will have immediate access so that his epic poem will have something of the primary mythic characteristic of Homer’s and not be reduced to some third-hand level of myth-making. Milton comes up with a brilliant solution to these related problems. He will write an epic that subsumes the classical epic tradition within a larger Christian framework. In particular, he will show that the great classical myths are only distortions of the original Christian truths. To reduce it to a formula: for Milton Christianity is true but has no traditional epic; the classical world has its epics, but it doesn’t have the truth. Milton wants to combine the truth of Christianity with the literary prestige of the classical epic. Homer got there first but, in his haste, he got the facts wrong. If Homer writes about the fall of Hephaestus from heaven, he’s confused. A being did fall from heaven, but that being was Satan, alias Lucifer:
Nor was his name unheard or unador’d
In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land
Men call’d him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heav’n, they fabl’d, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’er the Crystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A summer’s day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,
On Lemnos th’Aegean Isle: thus they relate,
Erring; for he with this rebellious rout
Fell long before. (PL, I.738-48)
Here we see how the fact that Milton comes later than Homer in the literary tradition becomes an advantage because Milton has had time to get the facts right. Milton knows the true story about Satan’s fall. His position as a latecomer no longer hurts him; instead it allows him to correct Homer. Milton may come later than Homer but, because of the Bible, Milton has access to a truth earlier—and more accurate--than Homer’s.
Milton can take pride in his source; as he says to his Muse: “Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first / Wast present” (I.19-20; see also XI.11). Milton lacks priority in the epic tradition, but his Biblical source provides him with it. Homer got his stories second-hand; his myths are distortions of Biblical truths. Milton can be the first true epic poet since he is the first epic poet to present the Biblical truth. Milton’s poetic strategy is to bring the classical epic tradition into his poem only to deny its validity, to correct it even in the process of referring to it. This is how Milton turns his “belatedness into an earliness,” to use Harold Bloom’s phrase (A Map of Misreading, 131). Milton paradoxically takes precedence over Homer because the story he tells took place before Homer or even Homer’s story. Milton does succeed in giving a classical flavor to his epic. He uses the standard devices of the classical epic—the invocation to the muse, epic catalogs, epic games, epic similes. But these borrowings from the classical epic do not undermine Milton’s claim to originality, since he is presenting the originals of what he is borrowing. A characteristic trope in Milton is to draw upon classical references to assert the grandeur of his subjects. These are negative comparisons. Milton cannot tell us how big Satan’s shield was, but he can tell us that it was much bigger than Achilles’s shield. To describe Pandaemonium, the assembly hall the fallen devils build for themselves, Milton compares it to human architectural achievements and belittles them in the process:
And here let those
Who boast in mortal things, and wond’ring tell
Of Babel, and the works of Memphian Kings,
Learn how their greatest Monuments of Fame
And Strength and Arts are easily outdone
By Spirits reprobate. (I.691-97)
Human creations pale by comparison with the structures Milton is writing about:
Not Babylon,
Nor great Alcairo such magnificence
Equall’d in all their glories. (I.717-19; see also I.573-87)
Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of negative comparison is Milton’s description of the Biblical Eden. There are many fabled paradises in world literature, but there is only one true paradise and it is described in Genesis: “Hesperian Fables true, / If true, here only” (IV.250-51). Faced with the difficult task of picturing Eden, Milton brings it to life by denying all the false paradises of the human imagination:
Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gath’ring flow’rs
Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis
Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; not that sweet Grove
Of Daphne by Orontes and th’ inspired
Castalian Spring might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive. . . .
Nor where Abassin Kings their issue Guard,
Mount Amara, though this by some suppos’d
True Paradise under the Ethiop Line. (IV.268-75, 280-82)
This is a peculiarly literary form of image. Milton doesn’t actually describe Eden; he evokes it by comparing it to other literary tropes of paradise. Milton is thereby able to maintain a humble pose while making the most extravagant claims for the grandeur of his subject matter. Milton hides his pride as an author behind the elevation of his subject matter.
At the same time, Milton is adding something to the Biblical tradition; he is doing something that the Bible itself cannot do, and that is to answer the classical tradition. Milton’s self-interest as a writer—to establish a place for himself in the epic tradition—happily coincides with his duty as a Christian, to assert the truth of the Bible against the falseness of the classics. This makes PL a polemic through and through, truly an epic to end all epics. In studying PL, we will look at the ways in which the poem brings together classical and Christian elements. The traditional view of Milton was that he was the last of the great Christian humanists; he fused classical and Christian values. From what we have seen of these two traditions, you might guess that this would be a difficult feat to accomplish. We must read PL very carefully to see how precarious a balance it sets up between its classical and Christian elements. Milton does want to gain for Christian beliefs the cultural authority associated with the classical tradition. And as we will see, at several points he does compromise his Christian heritage by trying to harmonize it with the classical tradition. Some might even say that he betrays Christianity by trying to make it compatible with classicism—that was Blake’s view of PL. But the sounder view is that in cases of conflict, Milton generally opted for the Christian view of things. PL gives the impression that it synthesizes successfully the classical and the Christian. We must view that attempted synthesis skeptically.
One last point to bear in mind as we discuss PL. If PL is indeed the epic to end all epics, what becomes of writers after Milton? Milton’s solution to his dilemma as an epic poet is a one-shot deal. He turns the tables on the classical epic poets by invoking his superior authority as a Christian, but in the process, he uses up all the available subject matter. After PL any subject must inevitably seem small. After all, the subject of PL is the creation of the universe and the establishment of the human condition. Milton in effect becomes a primary mythic poet for all those who come after him. Milton found the one opening within the Christian tradition for an artist with vast personal ambition to establish his own greatness and assert his originality. This suggests that after Milton, artistic ambition—the urge to be creative—will lead artists to break with conventional religion, to turn the tables on Milton.
I will not be attempting a comprehensive discussion of PL. I mainly want to discuss those issued raised by the poem that are important to the Romantics. This is all leading up to our focus in this course, the Romantic creation myth. In essence, I want to suggest how a Romantic would have read the poem, because as poets, the Romantics approached the traditional creation account principally through PL. My three main subjects are: 1)the devil 2)the first creation 3)the Fall.
The Importance of Satan
The psychology of Satan’s rebellion comes up again and again in Romantic literature, the pattern of a rebel becoming a tyrant. Satan begins as a proud rebel against what he calls God’s tyranny. He questions God’s authority, above all by questioning the Creation account itself:
That we were form’d then say’st thou? and the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferr’d
From Father to his Son? strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? Remember’st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d
By our own quick’ning power. (V.853-61)
Notice how Greek Satan is. He won’t accept hearsay accounts. He wants eyewitnesses of the creation. Like an ancient Greek hero, Satan values self-sufficiency. He thinks of the creation as an organic process, perfectly natural. It doesn’t require a divine creator. Satan thinks of himself as “self-begot” and hence autonomous. Throughout PL, Satan is associated with pagan or classical values. In that sense, he is the hero of the poem, a true epic protagonist on the model of Achilles and Odysseus. But Milton doesn’t set up the parallels between Satan and Achilles in order to raise Satan in our esteem. Rather he wants to lower Achilles. In other words, we’re supposed to become aware of not what is heroic in Satan but what is diabolic in Achilles. This is the way to understand the unending critical controversy over whether Satan is the hero of PL. In a technical sense he is the hero, the epic protagonist. He sets the action in motion. PL begins in medias res with respect to Satan’s story. It is his wrath and desire for vengeance (parallels to Achilles) that lead to all the tragedy. It is his epic wanderings that hold our interest in the story, as with Odysseus. Satan embodies the classical epic virtues: courage, self-reliance, determination, cunning, even wiliness. He is a fusion of the lion Achilles and the fox Odysseus. But Milton gives these virtues to his Satan to raise doubts about their worth. The active heroism of Satan is juxtaposed with the passive heroism of Christ. And in Milton’s view, Satan’s willfulness and self-assertiveness is seen as something ultimately less heroic than the patience, humility, obedience, and self-submissiveness of Christ.
Unfortunately, Milton blurs this issue by trying to have his cake and eat it too. In Books V and VI, he insists on giving Christ and all the loyal angels the same classical virtues he disparages elsewhere in Satan. Milton’s angels march just like the Greeks in Homer’s Iliad:
In silence their bright Legions, to the sound
Of instrumental Harmony that breath’d
Heroic Ardor to advent’rous deeds
Under their God-like Leaders in the Cause
Of God and his Messiah. On they move
Indissolubly firm. (V.63-69)
But on the whole Milton wants to contrast the false glory of the epic tradition with true Christian fortitude, the ability to endure suffering, shame, and indignity, epitomized by Christ’s crucifixion. This point is made explicitly in the invocation to Book IX, where Milton describes his epic subject as “Sad task, yet argument / Not less but more Heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles on his Foe pursu’d / Thrice Fugitive about Troy Walls; or rage / Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d” (IX.13-17). So much for Homer in the Iliad or Virgil in the Aeneid. Milton has chosen a subject higher than the classical theme of martial valor:
Not sedulous by Nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only Argument
Heroic deemed, chief maistry to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabl’d Knights
In Battles feign’d; the better fortitude
Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe Races and Games,
Or tilting Furniture, emblazon’d Shields,
Impresses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds;
Bases and tinsel Trappings, gorgeous Knights
At Joust and Tournament; then marshall’d Feast
Serv’d up in Hall with Sewers, and Seneschals;
The skill of Artifice or Office mean,
Not that which justly gives Heroic name
To Persons or to Poem. Mee of these
Nor skill’d nor studious, higher Argument
Remains. (IX.27-43)
Here Milton belittles the depiction of warfare in classical epic, but he also adds chivalric poems, to put his English predecessor Edmund Spenser in his place. Milton was not about to waste his time on the spurious legends of King Arthur and the Round Table. Milton turns his disadvantage to an advantage; he is not learned in warfare and not disposed to depict it (though he does so in Books V and VI). His achievement is to celebrate the Christian virtues of “Patience and Heroic Martyrdom,” which is the “better Fortitude” of the Christian.
The Invocation to Book IX, more than any other passage in PL, reveals Milton’s relation to the classical epic tradition. There are many classical references and allusions in PL, but they are systematically associated with Satan and the rebel angels. Milton sees something essentially satanic about the pride of the traditional epic hero. The best way of viewing the issue of the hero in PL is this: Adam is poised between two models of heroism—Satan and Christ—one is a model of pride and active self-assertion; the other is a model of humility and passive obedience to God, self-submission. For Milton, the self-sufficiency of the pagan hero pales before the heroic submission of Christ and the good Christian to God’s will. Unfortunately, as we will see, Adam at first takes Satan as his model and learns the lesson of submission to God’s will only painfully.
In any case, Satan’s heroism, so grand in his speeches, becomes tarnished in his deeds. In rebellion, he becomes a parody of what he rebelled against:
Hee
Affecting all equality with God,
In imitation of that Mount whereon
Messiah was declar’d in sight of Heav’n,
The Mountain of the Congregation call’d. (V.762-65)
At the very beginning of Satan’s rebellion, he imitates God. The devils present themselves as creative people, who will found a new order. Like the new prince in Machiavelli, they will be all the greater because of the adversities they face as newcomers to their rule. But as Milton presents it, their creativity is just faulty imitation of God: “As he our darkness, cannot we his Light / Imitate when we please?” (II.269-70). In general, creativity is disparaged in PL, that is, any creativity other than God’s. That is why Romantic artists felt that the poem stood in their way. Creativity is constantly seen as the devil’s work in PL. In Book I, we see that in the architecture of Hell. In Book VI, we see it in the invention of gunpowder and artillery. In Book XI, the Archangel Michael presents the negative view of the arts generally embodied in the Bible, when he speaks of a wicked race: “studious they appear / Of Arts that polish Life, Inventors rare, / Unmindful of their Maker, though his Spirit / Taught them, but they his gifts acknowledg’d none” (XI.609-12).
The Bible suggests that there is something impious about the arts; they reflect man’s rebelling against divine limits. Milton does not fail to draw the implications for human beings that it was the devils of old who invented all the arts:
And here let those
Who boast in mortal things, and wond’ring tell
Of Babel, and the works of Memphian Kings,
Learn how their greatest Monuments of Fame,
And Strength and Art are easily outdone
By Spirits reprobate, and in an hour
What in an age they with incessant toil
And hands innumerable scarce perform. (I.692-99)
Monuments of what humans call greatness are actually modelled on the works of devils. We see here clearly how the traditional account of creation, as worked up in Milton, strongly implies a deprecation of human creativity.
The point about the devil’s faulty imitation of God can best be seen in political terms. Satan originally claims to be speaking for liberty and he presents Hell as a democracy. Think of the open political debates in the devils’ council in Book II. Here Milton restores the political element to theogony, though only in the devil’s camp. In Heaven in PL there are no open debates, no issues left to be settled. In the Council in Hell, Milton does a great job of capturing the accents of English politicians. Consider the opening of Belial’s speech:
I should be much for open War, O Peers,
As not behind in hate; if what was urg’d
Main reason to persuade immediate War,
Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast
Ominous conjecture on the whole success:
When he who most excels in fact of Arms
In what he counsels and in what excels
Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair. (II.119-26)
Notice how brilliantly Satan manages parliamentary procedure. He lets the main factions have their say and then has Beelzebub send up a trial balloon for the policy Satan himself wants. This allows Satan to get all the glory for himself ultimately. As a result of Satan’s political skill, his democracy turns into a tyranny. One has to wonder if Milton had Oliver Cromwell in mind here. After all, Milton was foreign secretary in Cromwell’s revolutionary government and had plenty of opportunity to watch Cromwell become a dictator as Lord Protector of England. By the end of the council, the devils are in fact bowing as low to Satan as their leader as they ever did to God: “Towards him they bend / With awful reverence prone; and as a God / Extol him equal to the highest in Heav’n” (II.477-79). The rebel becomes a tyrant—this is a pattern we have seen already in Hesiod in the succession of divine dynasties and that will appear again and again in this course.
Underpinning a rebellion like Satan’s is not a genuine concern for liberty but simply will to power. Satan doesn’t want any power above him, but that means that he must rule over others himself. If he can’t accept his place in a divinely created order, he must create his own order in which he is on top. That’s what he thinks he can use human beings for—they will worship him. Satan can’t accept the idea that anything could be higher than he is. He can’t subject himself to anything. The consequence of this, as Milton presents it, is that Satan must subject others to his own will. By rebelling against the divine order, he is attempting to destroy the only system in which he has value—he depends on God’s approval—with the result that he must prop up his tottering self-esteem with the approval of others. Satan craves approval. In Romantic writers, this will to power is attributed to the creator god himself (Blake’s Urizen, Percy Shelley’s Jupiter). We can see Satan’s tragedy in his speech at the beginning of Book IV:
All Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least
Divided Empire with Heav’n’s King I hold. (IV.109-11)
God has pre-empted Good; God got there first; he got to define the good. Therefore the only way for Satan to be creative is in doing evil. God is like the primary mythic poet—he created the world. Satan is a latecomer on the scene. He can make a name for himself only by some form of dialectical reversal. Satan is faced with the choice between creativity and the good; this is happening prior to our modern understanding that to be creative is to be good.
There is an artistic dimension to all this. One can say that Satan is to God as Milton is to Homer (we’ll see this reproduced later in the relation of Blake to Milton). We begin to realize that there are two struggles going on in PL, one between Satan and God, one between Milton and Homer. This might help us understand Milton’s famous secret sympathy for the devil. It’s rooted in Milton’s ability to appreciate the position of someone who was faced with no apparent room for his creativity. Milton was faced with an epic literary tradition that appeared to be over, with no room for further advances. So Milton set out to flip good and evil in the classical epic tradition. What was good in the classical epic tradition, the goal of achieving self-sufficiency, becomes evil for Milton, while what was bad in the classical epic tradition, submissiveness, becomes good for Milton. This ethical inversion works to Milton’s artistic benefit. It allows him to triumph over Homer and stake his claim to priority among epic poets, if not on an aesthetic then on a moral basis.
Milton’s Creation Account
In Milton’s portrayal of Satan, it’s clear what the relation of the classical and the Christian elements in PL is. His portrait of Satan is Milton’s most effective way of denigrating classical values, although one might note that Satan’s continuing attractiveness to critics and readers is a tribute to the perennial attractiveness of classical heroic values. In the creation account given in Book VII of PL, the mixture of classical and Christian elements is more complex. The main point is that Milton attempts to give a classical clarity to the creation account, thereby seriously altering, if not distorting, its nature. Milton’s classicizing of the creation account is an essential feature of his program in PL, which is, as we are told from the start, to justify the ways of God to men. Justification requires clarity. In effect, what Milton is striving to do is to clear up the doubts surrounding the justice of God’s treatment of man in the creation. In that sense, PL is a work of the European Enlightenment, or at least a precursor of the Enlightenment spirit. It shows signs of the rationalism that was to revamp the understanding of creation in the 18th century. This is what Blake sensed—and objected to—in PL—the seeds of Deism.
With his epic amplitude, Milton takes much longer to tell the creation story than the Bible does. What does he add? The first thing he adds is to supply a motive for the Creation. God is responding to Satan’s rebellion:
But lest his heart exalt him in the harm
Already done, to have dispeopl’d Heav’n,
My damage fondly deem’d, I can repair
That detriment, if such it be to lose
Self-lost, and in a moment will create
Another World, out of one man a Race
Of men innumerable. (VII.150-56)
God’s motive is to show up Satan; we see here perhaps a hint of pride in the creator god. Milton takes away much of the sublimity of the biblical creation account by supplying this motive. The Bible is conspicuously silent on the subject. But Milton must supply a motive if his aim is to justify God. He wants to give the story the clarity of a classical drama, rather than the sublime mystery of the biblical narrative.
The next detail to note: Milton starts to get heretical. Relying presumably on the Gospel according to St. John, Milton heavily emphasizes the role of Christ in the creation. Indeed, Milton had his own view of the Trinity, above all, the notion that the Father would someday abdicate in favor of the Son. Giving Christ a prominent role in the creation softens the stark monotheism of the Old Testament creation account, and once again makes it less sublime. In general, PL is much less monotheistic in spirit than the Old Testament. The presence of Satan and all the other rebel angels adds an element of antagonism to the story. There is some sort of struggle going on in the creation. God has to watch out for Satan. At least he posts Raphael as a spy on the devils at the time of the creation:
For I that Day was absent as befell,
Bound on a voyage uncouth and obscure,
Far on excursion toward the Gates of Hell;
Squar’d in full Legion (such command we had)
To see that none thence issu’d forth a spy,
Or enemy, while God was in his work,
Lest he incenst at such eruption bold,
Destruction with Creation might have mixt. (VIII.229-36)
Milton’s God is still omnipotent, but unlike the Old Testament God, he doesn’t proceed entirely without opposition.
The start of the creation in PL really gets far away from the spirit of monotheism:
Meanwhile the Son
On his great Expedition now appear’d,
Girt with Omnipotence, with Radiance crown’d
Of Majesty Divine, Sapience and Love
Immense and all his Father in him shone.
About his Chariot numberless were pour’d
Cherub and Seraph, Potentates and Thrones,
And Virtues, winged Spirits, and Chariots wing’d,
From the Armory of God, where stand of old
Myriads between two brazen Mountains lodg’d. (VII.192-201)
In the Genesis account, creation is a sublime mystery; by the time Milton is through rattling off all the forces involved in creating the world, it doesn’t seem all that surprising that they could get the whole job done in 6 days. In PL, we are much closer to the world of classical mythology and theogony. It’s like Plato’s Timaeus: a higher God gives the orders and a bunch of inferior deities carry them out. But again, it’s in line with Milton’s larger intentions to make us visualize the act of creation, to make it comprehensible to us by using concrete analogies.
The next point—very much in line with the preceding—is that there is much less sense of a mysterious creation out of nothing in PL. Chaos seems to be pre-existent in Milton’s story:
Heav’n op’n’d wide
Her ever-during Gates, Harmonious sound
On golden Hinges moving, to let forth
The King of Glory in his powerful Word
And Spirit coming to create new Worlds.
On heav’nly ground they stood, and from the shore
They view’d the vast immeasurable Abyss
Outrageous as a Sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turn’d by furious winds
And surging waves. (VII.205-14)
Soon Milton mythologizes “Chaos” almost as a god and certainly as some kind of living being, as God begins creation (“For Chaos heard his voice,” VII. 220). In Milton’s account, creation seems to be a process of giving shape and form to pre-existing chaotic matter, more like what happens in the Timaeus than what happens in Genesis. Creation out of nothing seem to be too mysterious for Milton’s purposes. As an epic author, he cannot give visual representation to creation out of nothing. Even Milton’s vocabulary is classical. Back at II.916, we hear of God and “His dark materials to create new more Worlds,” and, even more surprisingly, at VII.557 we learn that God’s “new created World” (VII.554) corresponds to his “great Idea.” Milton’s language is Platonic or Aristotelian.
Now look at VII.216-17:
Silence, ye troubl’d waves, and thou Deep, peace,
Said then th’ Omnific Word, your discord, end.
This is where Genesis begins. But in PL, we lose the sense that this is an absolute beginning, or even perhaps a special moment. After all, we’ve waited until the seventh book of the epic to hear this; it does not come on the opening page. Moreover, we now know that many events preceded this one, some of them at least equally as exciting and momentous. A good clue to what’s happening is Milton’s term “omnific Word.” Here is Milton’s Latinizing of the Bible. The Bible would just say “Word.” Milton adds the Latinate adjective to give epic amplitude but, in the process, he loses sublimity. Note also Milton’s use of abstractions in his account, the sort of personifications characteristic of 18th century poetry, such as Chaos. Perhaps the most revealing passage is this:
Then stay’d the fervid Wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden Compasses, prepar’d
In God’s Eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things. (VII.224-27)
Here creation is accomplished by golden compasses; it is the work of a mathematical artisan, like the demiurge in the Timaeus (moreover the tool of creation is evidently in existence before the act of creation). This image made a deep impression on William Blake. It comes up in his color print of Isaac Newton and in the creation account Blake gives in his Book of Urizen. It’s in effect illustrated in one of Blake’s greatest art works, known as “The Ancient of Days,” which first appeared as the frontispiece of his prophecy Europe. This scene of God creating the world with compasses is where Blake saw the seeds of 18th century Deism in PL. He detected incipient signs of the Newtonian world view in Milton’s creation account—the world is presented as the product of a mathematical intellect, designed like a machine. The mathematical quality of the creation account in PL is Milton’s classical heritage. Blake saw this as the anti-biblical tendency in PL.
Now consider this familiar moment:
Let there be Light, said God, and forthwith Light
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure
Sprung from the Deep, and from her Native East
To journey through the airy gloom began,
Spher’d in a radiant Cloud, for yet the Sun
Was not; she in a cloudy Tabernacle
Sojourn’d the while. (VII.243-49)
These lines are beautiful in themselves and achieve a kind of classical opulence. But they lose much of the sublime effect of the Bible’s simplicity. Think how much grander is the Bible’s terse: “And God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Milton tries to describe the process by which light comes into being, supplying the details the Bible omits. The strangest moment is the idea of a pre-existent Sun, waiting in the wings to make its cosmic debut. This is close to the polytheism of pagan creation accounts, giving the heavenly bodies a status independent of the divine creation. As we saw in studying Genesis, the Bible deliberately demotes the status of the heavenly bodies by moving their creation to the fourth day.
As he moves on to the second day of creation, Milton’s account becomes increasingly pseudo-scientific:
And God made
The Firmament, expanse of liquid, pure,
Transparent, Elemental Air, diffus’d
In circuit to the uttermost convex
Of this great Round; partition firm and sure,
The Waters underneath from those above
Dividing. (VII.262-68)
This kind of vocabulary characterizes the rest of Milton’s creation account. Milton dwells on the process of creation. Creation seems to be less a continuing sequence of discrete acts by God; rather it seems to be a process that He sets in motion and then lets it unfold under its own power. This is very close to later Deist notions of divinity. As in the classical view, nature seems to be an independent power in PL:
The Earth was form’d, but in the Womb as yet
Of Waters, Embryon immature involv’d,
Appear’d not: over all the face of Earth
Main Ocean flow’d, not idle, but with warm
Prolific humour soft’ning all her Globe,
Fermented the great Mother to conceive. (VII.276-281)
Here the Earth is not a lifeless object; it has a creative force of its own, a kind of fermentation. Moreover, that force is feminine and maternal (a womb is involved)—very far from the strictly masculine conception of creation in Genesis. The same point is evident in the creation of plants and animals in PL. It often seems more like spontaneous generation than divine creation. Milton’s long account of the generation of the plants and the animals is permeated by an almost pagan sense of the wonder and variety of nature itself. Milton comes close to the Deist views of the 18th century—nature subsists on its own. God is not responsible for each and every act of creation. Instead God creates Nature—with a capital N (there is no word for “nature” in the Pentateuch). The Deist God creates general laws according to which the details of the physical universe come into being.
At the end of the creation account given to Adam, he has one nagging doubt. He questions the anthropocentrism of it all:
Reasoning I oft admire,
How Nature wise and frugal could commit
Such disproportions, with superfluous hand
So many nobler Bodies to create,
Greater so manifold to this one use,
For aught appears, and on their Orbs impose
Such restless revolution day by day
Repeated, while the sedentary Earth,
That better might with far less compass move,
Serv’d by more noble than herself, attains
Her end without least motion, and receives,
As Tribute such a sumless journey brought
Of incorporated speed, her warmth and light;
Speed, to describe whose swiftness Number fails. (VIII.25-8)
Note how “Nature” appears here with a capital N, and is both “wise and frugal,” as if it had a mind of its own. And Adam thinks of the heavenly bodies as “nobler.” Milton is aware of the ancient Greek viewpoint, which contradicts the Bible’s denial of anything like nobility to the sun and the planets. (Recall what we saw about Philo’s account of creation, and his classical admiration for the heavenly bodies.)
The archangel Raphael replies to Adam:
Consider first, that Great
Or Bright infers not Excellence; the Earth
Though, in comparison of Heav’n, so small,
Nor glistering, may of solid good contain
More plenty than the Sun that barren shines,
Whose virtues on itself works no effect,
But in the fruitful Earth; there first receiv’d
His beams, inactive else, their vigor find.
Yet not to Earth are those bright Luminaries
Officious, but to thee Earth’s inhabitant. (VIII.90-99)
This is a very revealing passage. It places the earth higher than the heavenly bodies. This shows the difference between the ancient Greek and the Hebrew viewpoints. Among the Hebrews, we see the primacy of the moral over the theoretical. The sun cannot just be nobler in itself. It may be grander than the earth, but it is less useful; in itself the sun is “barren.” It only has useful results on Earth. We see here a very bourgeois preference for “solid good.” For the ancient Greeks, the sun is nobler because it’s a higher object of cognition or contemplation. Milton highlights the anti-philosophical bias of the Bible, epitomized by its denigration of the heavens. Raphael’s speech culminates in this advice:
Heav’n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise:
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there
Live, in what state, condition or degree,
Contented that thus far have been reveal’d
Not of Earth only but of highest Heavn’n. (VIII.172-78)
The lesson Adam is supposed to learn in PL is to place moral considerations over theoretical. His quest should be to obey God, not to try to understand the universe. Adam should be a pious and moral man, not a philosopher. He should be “lowly wise.”
The Fall
The Fall is of course the key point of the story for Milton. This is where the question of God’s justice becomes acute. As we saw, the Biblical account of the Fall is sparse on psychological details. Here is where Milton’s epic amplitude really changes things. Milton supplies motives in detail and at length, and for all the characters: Adam, Eve, Satan, & God. The work becomes more like a well-made play than a myth. But here’s the problem—the result of filling in the psychological detail is only to make the story more unacceptable on the issue of justice. In Milton’s account, the narrative of the Fall begins with Eve’s desire to work alone. After all the time Raphael spends warning Adam against Satan, it turns out that the satanic temptation will be directed at Eve. Notice that Eve wants to be self-sufficient; in this she shows the trait of an epic hero just like Satan. She complains to Adam about not being left alone to face a challenge:
If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit strait’n’d by a Foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endu’d
Single with like defence, wherever met,
How are we happy, still in fear of harm? (IX.322-7)
Eve conveys a sense of the inadequacy of the state of innocence in Eden, and is not God responsible for that?
The more details Milton supplies, the more plausible he makes the seduction of Eve. Milton gives Satan a great argument. Notice that he is compared to a classical orator:
As when of old some Orator renown’d
In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence
Flourish’d, since mute, to some great cause addrest. . . . (IX.670-72)
Once again, Milton is suggesting something satanic about the classical world, but we cannot help thinking that poor Eve is faced with overwhelming rhetorical skill. Milton’s Satan sounds like a sophisticated gnostic. In questioning the prohibition against eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Satan speaks eloquently of the value of knowledge:
Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe,
Why but to keep you low and ignorant,
His worshippers: he knows that in the day
Ye Eat thereof, your Eyes that seem so clear,
Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then
Op’n’d and clear’d, and ye shall be as Gods,
Knowing both Good and Evil as they know. (IX.702-8)
What clinches the argument for Satan is the proportion he sets up:
That ye should be as Gods, since I as Man,
Internal Man, is but proportion meet,
I of brute human, yee of human Gods. (IX.710-12)
This is the evidence Eve sees right before her eyes; a serpent—a brute—is now speaking like a human in front of her. He claims this is the result of eating the forbidden fruit. Why should not Eve, a human, now become a god according to the same formula?
The metamorphosis of Eve is evident in the way she begins worshipping the Tree of Knowledge, promising to take care of it. She does not stop short of idolatry:
So saying, from the Tree her step she turn’d,
But first low Reverence done, as to the power
That dwelt within, whose presence had infus’d
Into the plant sciental sap, deriv’d
From Nectar, drink of gods. (IX.834-38)
Eve begins to sound like Satan when she sarcastically refers to God as “Our great Forbidder, safe with all his Spies / About him” (IX.815-16). As one of the first consequences of the fall, Eve is proud of her new status and now wants to escape her subordination to Adam and to achieve mastery over him. The only thing that daunts her is the thought that she might die and Adam might live on without her. This is how she tries to persuade Adam to join her in partaking of the forbidden fruit:
Thou therefore also taste, that equal Lot
May join us, equal Joy, as equal Love;
Lest thou not tasting, different degree
Disjoin us, and I then too late renounce
Deity for thee, when Fate will not permit. (IX.881-85)
Notice her sophistry here. Eve really is afraid that Adam will live while she dies, but instead she claims to be worried that she will achieve a status much higher than his if he does not share in the fruit.
All of this makes Adam’s decision to stand by Eve seem all the nobler:
No no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe. (IX.913-16)
With these words, Adam lives up to his original compact with Eve. What would we think of Adam if he told Eve: “Tough luck; I’ve got 11 ribs left” (or maybe 12 according to some theologians, but who’s counting?). Adam is not faced with a simple decision at this point. Indeed, he’s caught between two different loyalties. Yes, he should be loyal to God, but he also promised God that he would be loyal to Eve. It’s not simply clear that his compact about the fruit should take precedence over his compact with his wife. In supplying motives to his characters, Milton ends up making the Fall seem all too plausible psychologically. It’s hard to see how any human being would have acted differently in these circumstances. And it’s easy to see how Milton could have made Adam & Eve more culpable. That is why many Romantics, including Blake and Percy Shelley, thought Milton was on the side of rebellion against God—evidently, he couldn’t help making out a powerful case for God’s opponents in PL.
Virtue and Freedom
Let’s conclude by looking at the ethical issues raised by PL. The main issue is the relation of freedom and virtue. It’s on this issue that Milton most clearly vacillates between a classical and a Christian viewpoint, and introduces a thoroughly confusing moral ambiguity into PL. On the whole, Milton holds to the classical position: virtue is the precondition of freedom. Freedom requires what Milton calls “right reason,” the ability to choose rightly, which requires the rule of reason over the passions because otherwise your ethical vision will be colored and clouded by your desires. For Milton, you’re not free if you’re just doing anything you want; that can mean that you’re just a slave to your passions. This point comes up on a political level, in Abdiel’s reproach to his fellow angels for following Satan:
This is servitude,
To serve th’ unwise, or him who hath rebell’d
Against his worthier, as thine now serve thee,
Thyself not free, but to thyself enthrall’d. (VI.178-81)
To rebel against a just ruler like God is not to be free but to become enslaved to one’s self and one’s own desires. This is a fusion of classical and Christian values: “God and Nature bid the same” (VI.176). After the fall, Adam & Eve become enslaved to their own passions:
For Understanding rul’d not, and the Will
Heard not her lore, both in subjection now
To sensual Appetite, who from beneath
Usurping over sovran Reason claim’d
Superior sway. (IX.1127-30)
The idea that reason legitimately rules the passions is the foundation of the classical notion of natural right. Milton later speaks in PL of “Rational Liberty” when Michael instructs Adam & Eve:
Since thy original lapse, true Liberty
Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells
Twinn’d, and from her hath no divided being:
Reason in man obscur’d, or not obey’d,
Immediately inordinate desires
And upstart Passions catch the Government
From Reason, and to servitude reduce
Man till then free. Therefore since he permits
Within himself unworthy Powers to reign
Over free Reason, God in Judgment just
Subjects him from without to violent Lords;
Who oft as undeservedly enthral
His outward freedom: Tyranny must be,
Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse. (XII.83-96)
The ideas here are very classical. But there is a hint in PL of the later, characteristically modern, and especially Romantic, position—that freedom is the precondition of virtue. You’re not acting virtuously unless you’re willing your actions freely, of your own free will. You can’t force men to be virtuous. That is why God gave free will to human beings, as Raphael explains to Adam and Eve:
God made thee perfect, not immutable;
And good he made thee, but to persevere
He left it in thy power, ordain’d thy will
By nature free, not over-rul’d by Fate
Inextricable, or strict necessity;
Our voluntary service he requires,
Not our necessitated, such with him
Finds no acceptance, nor can find, for how
Can hearts, not free, be tri’d whether they serve
Willing or no, who will but what they must
By Destiny, and can no other choose? (V.524-34)
In Milton’s epic, God himself insists on this point about free will when he talks about the original revolt of the angels:
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere
Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love,
Where only what they needs must do, appear’d,
Not what they would? What praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When Will and Reason (Reason is also choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil’d,
Made passive both, had serv’d necessity,
Not mee. (III.102-111)
It’s easy to see what “free will” is, but what is “free reason”? In his Areopagitica, Milton insists that “reason is but choosing.” But is it a matter of choice that 2 + 2 =4? Are we free concerning that proposition in the way we are free with the proposition: “I won’t do my Hum 118 reading tonight”? This is a point where Milton gets hung up on the fundamental differences between the classical and the Biblical creation accounts. The Bible places its emphasis on will, not reason. The Creation is good, not because it is rational, but because God willed it and proclaimed it good. In the Bible, everything is ultimately a matter of divine will. If 2 + 2=4, it’s because God willed it that way. A consistently Christian view would have to say that if God wanted 2 + 2=5, it would be so. Otherwise God would be limited by the boundaries of reason. This is a case of Milton wanting to have his cake and eat it too. He wants the prestige of both Christian and classical ethics. Right conduct is right because God wills it and because reason calls for it. Milton doesn’t allow for a conflict here, but in cases of conflict, he would have to side with God’s will (that’s virtually the lesson of PL). This emphasis on will, and hence on freedom of the will, points ahead to the Romantics—to the notion that freedom is the precondition of virtue, an idea that we’ll see was developed by Rousseau.
How Paradise Lost Looked to Later Authors
Here’s another major issue in PL—the dialectic of innocence and experience. The poem embodies a denigration of innocence. We get a sense of the very limited character of the innocent state. Milton is uncomfortable with this kind of constraint. In Aereopagitica, he says: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race” (Milton 17). In Eden, to be happy, man has to be ignorant; there’s no way around that. And to be wise, he has to be miserable. That is the tragic dilemma posited by Milton. But there is a possible resolution, which points to the idea of Paradise Regained. This is the “paradise within thee, happier far” that Michael speaks of to Adam and Eve (XII.587). The hope is that eventually man can regain his happiness, while still retaining the knowledge he has gained in the interim. This pattern points ahead to what we will see is the Romantic myth of progress, which consists of three stages: happy innocence, unhappy experience, and innocence regained on a higher level (we’ll see this pattern most clearly in William Blake). But there is an important difference here. Unlike what we’ll see in the Romantics, Milton has a wholly pessimistic view of human history, set out in Books XI and XII of PL. For Milton, human history is a cycle of tyranny. The Fall is constantly repeated. Just men are repeatedly scorned and destroyed. Nothing comes out of human history, but something eventually comes into it—namely Jesus Christ. This is the Incarnation. Here the source of the transformation of the human condition is transcendent, not immanent as we’ll be seeing in the Romantics. Michael speaks of God intervening in human history to restore paradise:
For then the Earth
Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days. (XII.463-65)
This promise leads Adam to speak of the Fortunate Fall:
O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought
Light out of darkness! (XII.469-73)
Starting with Blake, we will see how the Romantics reconceive this apocalyptic third stage of history as the synthesis of innocence and experience. Milton has a very different conception of this pattern, but he points the way to Romantic attempts at a solution.
Let’s now look at the results of the whole process of creation in PL. The only form of creation relevant to man is hostile to man. In response to the Fall and to punish human beings, God adjusts the heavens, bringing the moderate Edenic environment to an end and introducing extremes of weather into human existence. Here’s what happens to the Sun:
The Sun
Had first his precept so to move, so shine
As might affect the Earth with cold and heat
Scarce tolerable, and from the North to call
Decrepit Winter, from the South to bring
Solstitial summer’s heat. (X.651-56)
This is in effect the Second Creation, and this time no more Mr. Nice Guy. Again we see a proto-Deist view: “These changes in the Heav’ns, though slow, produc’d / Like changes on Sea and Land” (X.692-93). God makes some minor adjustments in the cosmic machine, and then allows them to take their inevitable course. Presto Chango—man is living in the lousy world we now live in, and living by the sweat of his brow. And in some ways—indeed, in a very practical sense—Satan ends up ruling that world, especially in political terms.
How might a later poet look at this story? Milton claims that the classical poets told distorted versions of the truth. But suppose Milton’s version is itself a distortion. Suppose there is a version of the myth that antedates the account in Genesis. The course of poetic development, as we shall see, is that later and later poets claim to have access to earlier and earlier stages of the story. One could be more daring than Milton. If Satan seems to rule this world, then perhaps when Satan fell, he created this world. This is the Gnostic position. Indeed, after Milton, it became necessary to look at the creation myth afresh. Up until Milton, it had been a “living legend,” which means that it had not yet achieved a final and definitive form. The story was still growing and ever-changing. Authors still felt that there were undiscovered possibilities in the myth—this is what it means to say that a myth is still alive. Of course, others before Milton had tried to give definitive versions of the Creation story. What distinguishes Milton is that he did such a great job of it. PL is such a great work of literature that any writer in his right mind would despair of emulating it. Who could touch the subject after what Milton had done with it? And he even wrote the sequel: Son of Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained. PL is a kind of artistic dead-end; there was nowhere to go from it. Many successful long poems in the 18th century were mock-epics, like Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock or his Dunciad. Would-be epic writers found that they could only parody the form. By giving a final form to the Biblical creation account, Milton in effect closed it off as a vital subject for art. He pinned down all the details, leaving no room for new mythic invention.
We might turn to Pope’s An Essay on Man to see what happened to theogony in the 18th century. But probably the best work in the genre of that period is musical, Franz Joseph Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung (“The Creation”). This work shows how 18th-century rationalism changed the understanding of the Creation. Haydn’s text is ultimately derived from PL—an Englishman had prepared a libretto from PL, probably for use by Handel (much the way Handel’s oratorio Samson is derived from Milton’s Samson Agonistes.) The English libretto fell into Haydn’s hands and he had it translated into German (by Baron van Swieten, who was also Mozart’s patron). There’s one very interesting difference from PL in this libretto—it gives the story of the Creation alright, but it omits one little detail: the Fall. The oratorio concludes with a love duet between Adam & Eve; it contains a hint in the next to the last number, sung by the angel Uriel, that if they aspire beyond their state, they may get into trouble, but that’s more or less lost in the concluding hymn to God’s power. All the emphasis is on the glory and perfection of God’s creation. There’s almost no indication that anything could go wrong. Now, of course, one could say that all Haydn was writing about was the Creation, and the Fall did not fit under that heading. But still, it’s significant that by Haydn’s time—he wrote The Creation in 1797-98—it seemed possible to an artist to separate the story of the Creation from that of the Fall. And of course Haydn never wrote an oratorio called The Fall. In the 18th century, the Fall began to drop out of the picture, in accord with the new Deist view that the universe is rationally ordered. This rationalism is reflected in Haydn’s music. Everything is ordered within the music. The major key predominates in the music. Haydn at times tries, but he conveys little sense of mystery about the Creation. Even the depiction of chaos in the opening orchestral passage is rather tame (certainly by modern standards of dissonance).
There’s also an interesting change in the organization. As you will recall, the Genesis account of Creation divides up into two parts of 3 days each. The creation of the heavenly bodies does not occur until the 4th day and thus begins the 2nd period of days. We saw that this represents a demotion of the heavenly bodies compared to what happens in pagan creation accounts, which frequently begin with the Sun. Haydn also divides his creation account into 2 parts, except that he splits the story into the first 4 days and the last 2. Thus Part I of Haydn’s Creation builds up to the creation of the Sun and moon and the other heavenly bodies. It’s clear that this is the culmination of Part I and the heavenly bodies are now given a privileged place. This is very much an 18th-century view of creation. All the emphasis is on light, as if in tribute to the 18th-century idea of Enlightenment. We find an almost pagan view of the sun and moon in Haydn’s oratorio. They seem to be mythic beings in their own right. The sun is “ein wonnervoller Bräutigam, ein Riese, stolz und froh, zu rennen seine Bahn“ (“a joyful bridegroom, a giant proud and glad; he runs his course;”admittedly these words are derived from Psalm 19). In the Creation the heavenly bodies are no longer demoted as in Genesis; they are restored to the grandeur they held in the classical view. In the 18th century, largely as a result of the triumph of Newtonian physics, the orderly rotation of the heavenly bodies, predictable because of Newton’s laws, was once again taken as primary evidence of order in the universe and hence of its divine origin. Haydn’s oratorio, however unintentionally, clearly manifests the rationalizing of traditional religion characteristic of the 18th century. God’s ways to men are now taken as so well justified that, not only is there nothing to complain about, there’s not even anything to be dissatisfied with anymore in the universe. Think of the famous line from Pope’s Essay on Man: “Whatever IS, is right” (Epistle 1, ll.93-94). For Romantic artists, Blake especially, this rationalized order of creation led to the ultimate in complacency. The Romantics could no longer work within such a tradition; they felt they had to break out of the 18th-century ruts.
Thus, a number of Romantic artists attempted to rewrite PL. We find this in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his Book of Urizen, and his Four Zoas, in Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in Byron’s Cain, in Keats’s Hyperion, and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. They use the same basic structure but transform its inner meaning. But before this transformation could take place, the philosophical support of the traditional creation account had to be undermined further than it was in Milton’s day. Not until well into the 18th century did it become possible to challenge fairly openly the Biblical creation account. We will see that happen in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, a basically negative work but one that, by shaking the foundations of the central creation myth of Western culture, prepared the way for the reawakening of myth in Romantic art. Hume in effect announced “open season” on creation myths. Once he exposed the profound difficulties of the orthodox religious account, he set people’s imaginations free to come up with new versions. Philosophical skepticism reduced orthodoxy to the level of myth, mere myth. Hume put the Biblical account on a par with all other versions. He undermined the centrality of the Biblical account of creation, leaving no one accepted version. Artists could now treat the mythic subject more freely. There could not be a more sober, unimaginative man than David Hume. He hoped to put to rest man’s endless metaphysical speculations, “those thoughts that wander through Eternity,” to use Milton’s phrase. By showing the innumerable speculative possibilities that might account for the universe as we see it, Hume hoped to convince people that it is fruitless to get lost in such intellectual mazes. But in fact Hume could not put the metaphysical urge to rest. Those who came after him were more willing to continue the quest for the answer to the question of how the human condition came to be what it is. In his dialectical manner, Hume had playfully and ironically raised all sorts of mythical possibilities for the creation of the world, but the Romantics pursued these possibilities imaginatively and in all seriousness. At roughly the same time, Rousseau gave the first outlines of a new myth of creation, a new myth of human origins—in particular a new story of innocence and experience that was to provide the new framework of much of Romantic literature.
BIBILOGRAPHY
Harold Bloom. “Milton and his precursors.” A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975
William Empson. Milton’s God. London: Chatto & Windus. 1961
J. M. Evans. Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968
Northrop Frye. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965
Isabel Gamble MacCaffrey. Paradise Lost as “Myth”. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959
John Milton. Paradise Lost. Ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1935
John Milton. Aeropagitica and Other Political Writings of John Milton. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999
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