Milton, John - Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

Milton’s first intention had been to write, after the example of Spenser, an epic founded on the legends of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table: he changed his mind and thought of writing a tragedy on the biblical theme of the Fall and Redemption of Man. This contemplated tragedy was to begin with the address of Satan to the sun whish now opens the fourth book of Paradise lost. Finally the poet decided to work the great biblical tale into a noble epic.

In 1665 the work was completed. The disasters which visited London in close succession: the Great Plague in 1665 and the Great Firer in 1666 delayed the publication of the poem, which came out in 1667. Four years later, Milton published another epic: Paradise Regained and a lyrical drama: Sanson Agonistes. The last years of the poet’s life were darkened by disease and domestic disappointments. Milton died in 1674. He was buried in St. Gile’s Crippelegate, beside his father. The work of Milton is unique of its kind; in the artistic spirit of the Renascence and the graver mood of Puritanism are curiously blended. Milton’s early poems, written at a time when Puritanism was making headway in England, are, by the wealth of their imagery and the classical touches with which they abound decidedly Elizabethan; and although Paradise Lost is essentially biblical in spirit as well as in subjet-matter, it is clear that it owes much of its artistic splendour to the Elizabethan sense if beauty which is the mind of Milton harmoniously allied to religious fervour. The merit of Paradise Lost were fully recognized until Addison, in an essay of the Spectator, revelead what had remained a “hidden treasure” to many Englishmen. Since then, critics have been unanimous in declaring Milton the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, and Paradise Lost has never ceased to be a popular work. The reasons of this durable popularity do not lie so much in the interest of the subject treated by Milton as in the wealth and freshness of the poet’s imagination, his elevation of thought and above all his wonderful diction. “There are no such vistas and avenues of verse as Milton’s. In reading Paradise Lost one has a feeling of spaciousness that no other poet gives. The strain heard in his earlier productions is of a higher mood as regard metrical construction than anything that had thrilled as regards metrical construction than anything that had thrilled a the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent, till he touched the keys of the epical organ pipers of the various English language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing breath” (Lowell)