Reading Paradise Lost

David Hopkins

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118918180, 9781118471005
• eBook ISBN: 9781118474440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading Paradise Lost

"This lucid and entirely jargon-free guide to Paradise Lost will help any reader of the poem to find their feet, and to understand what makes it the best poem in the English language. Hopkins has one, and only one, resemblance to Milton's Satan, which is that he can make intricate seem straight."
Colin Burrow, Oxford University

"This is the best introduction to Paradise Lost there is, suitable for the intelligent sixth-former or undergraduate, or the enquiring general reader outside the academy – or indeed anyone who cares about poetry. It is also a joy to read, indeed a real page-turner – and of how many academic books can one say that?"
Charles Martindale, Bristol University

Concise enough to be assimilated in a single session, this short volume maps the wonders of Milton's poetic landscape. The book offers an exploration of some of the main narrative and poetic elements of the epic poem – qualities which have compelled and fascinated readers for more than three centuries. The author, a celebrated authority on English poetry of the period, engages with (and attempts to counter) some of the critical arguments that impede readers' enjoyment of the poem. This volume emphasizes the aesthetic experience of reading Paradise Lost and brings out the pleasure to be derived from one of the great literary achievements of humanity.

1

Paradise Lost : Poem or “Problem”?

Two Propositions

I begin this short exploration of Paradise Lost with two simple propositions, which the rest of the book will be devoted to fleshing out and, I hope, substantiating. The first proposition is that Paradise Lost is a narrative poem, not a work of theology, or philosophy, or political polemic, and that it works on readers’ minds according to the laws and procedures of narrative poetry, not according to those which govern the other kinds of discourse. The second proposition is that discussion of Paradise Lost always begins to go awry when the truth of the first proposition is forgotten.

The Laws of Poetry

What do I mean by saying that Paradise Lost operates “according to the laws of poetry”? “Poetry,” of course, is notoriously difficult to define. When asked, “What is poetry?,” Samuel Johnson is reported to have replied: “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.”¹ Else­where, however, Johnson ventured some more positive suggestions on the subject. When discussing, for example, some of the technical minutiae of versification employed by poets, he remarked:

Without this petty knowledge no man can be a poet; and … from the proper disposition of single sounds results that harmony that adds force to reason, and gives grace to sublimity; that shackles attention and governs passions.²

Johnson was here drawing attention to the way that the powerful emotional effects produced by poetry are the direct result of a skillful deployment of language, which is organized and patterned by poets to a far more telling and significant degree than is usual in either ­written or spoken language. Poets, to be sure, have regularly stressed the role of “inspiration” in the exercise of their art – the belief that they are, in some sense, in a “higher” state when composing their work than that which they command in ordinary life. Milton himself, indeed, powerfully invokes this idea when, at the beginning of Books I and VII of Paradise Lost he pleads for the assistance in his great task of Urania, the Greek muse of astronomy whom he identifies as the inspiring power behind the prophet-poets of the Bible.

But such inspiration goes hand in hand, Johnson’s passage quoted above suggests, with a meticulous and painstaking exercise of verbal artistry. If poetic genius is, in another formulation of Johnson’s, “cold” and “inert” without its capacity to “amplify” and “animate” its raw material, it is also a faculty that involves much labor of “collecting” and “combining.”³ Poets deploy the full resources of words – not only their meanings in the obvious dictionary sense, but their subtler resonances, overtones, connections, suggestions, and ambiguities. Poets are also attentive to the ways in which language has been deployed by predecessors in their art. They both absorb the language of their forebears silently into their own, and signal towards it openly by various kinds of imitation, allusion, and echo. In poetry, language is organized so as to exploit its sounds and rhythms to the full, its capacity to evoke or – so it has seemed to many – “enact” its subject matter by onomatopoeia, assonance, and other mimetic effects.⁴ For this reason, poetry is best appreciated when read aloud, whether in a full vocal rendering, or to the mind’s ear. It needs to be experienced sensuously and viscerally as well as intellectually. It speaks, in W. B. Yeats’s famous phrase, to “the whole man – blood, imagination, ­intellect, running together.”⁵ In poetry, “form” and “content,” “style” and “subject” are indivisible:

If you read the line, “The sun is warm, the sky is clear,” you do not experience separately the image of the warm sun and clear sky, on the one side, and certain unintelligible rhythmical sounds on the other; nor yet do you experience them together, side by side; but you experience the one in the other … Afterwards, no doubt, when you are out of the poetic experience but remember it, you may by analysis decompose this unity, and attend to a substance more or less isolated, and a form more or less isolated. But these are things in your analytic head, not in the poem, which is poetic experience. And if you want to have the poem again, you cannot find it by adding together these two products of decomposition; you can only find it by passing back into poetic experience. And then what you recover is no aggregate of factors, it is a unity in which you can no more separate a substance and a form than you can separate living blood and the life in the blood.⁶

Reflections of the kind summarized above have become common­place in the discussion of poetry. But for many modern readers the term “poem” has effectively come to mean “short poem,” and “poetry” today suggests a kind of writing – usually in the form of first-person reflection – that can be printed on one side, or at the very most, two or three sides, of paper. For most modern readers, the form most associated with storytelling is not poetry but the prose novel.

But Milton, of course, wrote in – and sought to extend and enrich – a tradition of narrative poetry stretching back to the great classical epics of Homer and Virgil. Narrative verse in this tradition – which enjoyed great prestige for centuries – was thought to have all the qualities associated with short poems, but many more besides. The great narrative poems were thought to have the same powers of verbal suggestiveness, animation and enactment that are found in shorter examples of poetic art. Such powers, it was felt, allowed readers of narrative verse a vivid emotional engagement with, rather than a mere intellectual comprehension of, the actions they depicted. Alexander Pope, for example, described the effect on him of Homer’s Iliad thus:

No man of a true poetical spirit is master of himself while he reads [Homer]. What he writes is of the most animated nature imaginable; every thing moves, every thing lives, and is put in action. If a council be called or a battle fought, you are not coldly informed of what was said or done as from a third person. The reader is hurried out of ­himself by the force of the poet’s imagination, and turns in one place to a hearer, in another to a spectator.⁷

And Pope wrote in similar terms of a much shorter and much more recent narrative poem, John Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast (1697). In that work, Dryden had imagined how Alexander the Great – the alleged son of Jupiter (“Lybian Jove”) and the mightiest conqueror in the world, who has just triumphed in battle over the great Persian empire – was disconcertingly transported by the mercurial artistry of his court poet-musician Timotheus into a succession of emotional states quite beyond his control. To read Dryden’s poem, Pope suggested in his Essay on Criticism (1711), is to feel Alexander’s constantly shifting emotions with something like the irresistible immediacy experienced by the poem’s “godlike hero” himself:

Hear how Timotheus’ varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!
While, at each change, the son of Lybian Jove
Now burns with glory, and then melts with love;
Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow;
Now sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow:
Persians and Greeks like turns of nature found,
And the world’s victor stood subdued by sound!
The power of music all our hearts allow;
And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.

(374–83)

The great narrative poems, it was believed, did not merely reflect, reproduce, or record the world we inhabit in daily life. They could create “new worlds,” inhabitable only in the imagination, drawing on the world we know but radically transforming, reconstituting, and recombining its elements. In the words of Shakespeare’s Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

(V. i. 14–17)

Narrative poets could, moreover, it was believed, combine emotional states and sentiments which would normally be thought incompatible, and could make attractive and comprehensible beliefs, relationships and events which would be perplexing, even repellent, in ordinary life. The poet Shelley commented memorably on this quality in his Defence of Poetry (written, 1821, published 1840):

Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union, under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches.

Narrative poems, like dramas, it was thought, cannot be properly represented by extracts, or in parts, but work in a cumulative manner to produce their effects on the imagination. Like dramas, they contain speeches in which different characters are allowed their say, and different views are juxtaposed, without being resolved into any single perspective. In the great Preface to his edition of the works of Shakespeare (1765), Samuel Johnson noted that while Shakespeare’s plays contain eminently quotable “practical axioms and domestic wisdom,” “his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable and the tenor of his dialogue.” In the same way, the insights of a great narrative poem, it was thought, are not located, in a detachable way, in any of its local parts – even those in which the poet apparently speaks in his own voice and offers his own commentary on the action – but in the temporally unfolding and cumulative effect of the whole, and the dramatic interplay between its descriptive passages (including the extended similes that are a such a notable feature of epic poetry) and the various “voices” which speak within it.⁸ Key sentiments and ideas are returned to, and seen from different angles as the narrative progresses. Apparent digressions and interludes turn out, as one reads, to be relevant to the poem’s larger concerns. Significant words – in Paradise Lost, for example, such apparently simple terms as “bliss,” “height,” “love,” “naked,” “reason,” “sin,” “sweet” – acquire further depth and resonance as the story unfolds. And at the local level, the narrative poet controls the movement, rhythm, and evocative power of his language in the way with which we have become familiar from shorter poems, thus enabling any “ideas” or “doctrines” which his work contains to affect the reader in a quite a different way from that in which similar material would affect them if encountered in a work of philosophy or theology.

Paradise Lost, this book suggests, operates as a narrative poem in the ways broadly sketched above. It achieves its objective of “justifying the ways of God to men” not by deductive reasoning or theological dogma, but by conducting us through an experiential process which conveys to us both the goodness of the divine dispensation which it imagines, and the perils of rejecting that dispensation. It allows us to live with paradoxes which in other kinds of writing would seem mere contradictions. It solicits our imaginative participation in the events which it depicts, and enables us to comprehend the sentiments of the various agents in those events with inwardness and sympathy. It brings home to us the complexities and difficulties of the choices which they face. It offers a plausible depiction of scenes, sentiments, and relationships which, in other treatments, might seem remote from human comprehension and concern. And it does all this in ­language that is remarkable for its variety, ranging from sublime grandeur to the most minute and sensuous delicacy.

Such a general view of Milton’s poem was once commonplace. What has caused it to lose its hold? One answer, I think, might go somewhat as follows. Paradise Lost contains, at various points, arguments that are close to those of philosophy or theology. The poem, no less than those of Lucretius and Dante, is, indeed, full of theological and philosophical argumentation. That argumentation, moreover – about divine foreknowledge, human free will, the relations between the sexes, the origins of evil – concerns issues on which Milton himself expressed strong views in prose, and about which his readers are likely to have strong opinions of their own. It has been very easy, therefore, for commentators on Paradise Lost to slide from talking about Milton’s ideas and arguments as they are presented in the poem into discussing them as if they were independent entities, abstractable from “the progress of the fable and the tenor of the dialogue” of Paradise Lost. It has also been frequently assumed that Paradise Lost contains much that Milton believed as literal, historical fact, but which we find quite unacceptable or ludicrous. Milton, it has been suggested, was asking us to accept and approve of a wrathful, omniscient, anthropomorphic God, and a hierarchical arrangement of the universe in which, at the centre, man and woman exist in a divinely appointed hierarchy. And he was asking us to believe in these not as fictions, symbols, myths, or metaphors, but as events with a factual, historical status.

Two French Critics and an English Poet on Paradise Lost

Such arguments, I would suggest, are based on serious misapprehensions about Milton’s whole artistic endeavor. In support of such a proposition, let first us consider two general statements about Paradise Lost by critics of the past. They are both by Frenchmen of a decidedly skeptical temperament. The first is by the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778), and is taken from his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727):

What Milton so boldly undertook, he performed with superior strength of judgement, and with an imagination productive of beauties not dreamed of before him. The meanness, if there is any, of some parts of the subject is lost in the immensity of the poetical invention. There is something above the reach of human forces to have attempted the creation without bombast, to have described the gluttony and curiosity of a woman without flatness, to have brought probability and reason amidst the hurry of imaginary things belonging to another world, and as far remote from the limits of our notions as they are from our earth; in short, to force the reader to say, “If God, if the angels, if Satan would speak, I believe they would speak as they do in Milton.”
I have often admired [wondered at] how barren the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Reading Poetry
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 1 Paradise Lost : Poem or “Problem”?
• 2 God, Satan, and Adam
• 3 Eden
• 4 The Fall
• Further Reading
• Index to lines and passages from Paradise Lost
• Index to main text and notes