Paradise Lost

What It Is

An epic poem in unrhymed English verse, published in 1667 in ten books and reissued in 1674, rearranged into twelve. Milton had gone blind around 1652. He held the lines in his head overnight and gave them out in the morning to a daughter, a friend, a paid amanuensis, anyone available.

He had been Latin Secretary to Cromwell's republic and had defended the execution of a king in print, across Europe, under his own name. When the monarchy returned he was arrested, his books were burned by the hangman, and he came very close to dying for it. He was in his mid-fifties, ruined, and he sat down to write this.

The verse is blank, and he defended that choice in a note prefixed to the second issue, calling rhyme a modern bondage. The syntax is Latinate: subjects held far from their verbs, clauses suspended for ten lines and then landed. It is a poem built for the ear, and the difficulty largely disappears when you read it aloud.

Why It Matters

It is the one poem in English that stands with Homer, Virgil and Dante, and the last epic anyone wrote that mattered. Everything after it that reaches for that scale is either imitating it or refusing it.

It has also been fought over more fiercely than any other English poem. Blake said Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it; Shelley agreed; C. S. Lewis and, later, Stanley Fish built careers on the reply. The quarrel is not academic housekeeping. What you conclude about this poem is what you conclude about obedience, liberty and the right to rebel, which is exactly why a defeated republican wrote it.

Downstream: Frankenstein takes its epigraph from it, the Romantics could not leave it alone, and Philip Pullman built a trilogy out of arguing with it. Once you have read it you will find it under half of English literature.

Before You Read

Ten and a half thousand lines, fifteen to twenty hours, one book to a sitting. The vocabulary is not the problem. The sentences are.

Read for the verb. Milton suspends a sentence across ten or twelve lines and then completes it, and if you hunt down the main clause and let the rest fall into place around it, most of the difficulty dissolves. Do this for fifty lines and you will have taught yourself the poem's grammar.

Read it aloud, or listen to it. This is not a refinement; it is how the poem is designed to be received.

Which Edition to Read

• John Leonard (Penguin Classics, 2000) — recommended. Modern spelling, a clean uncluttered page, notes at the back where they belong, and an introduction that takes the poem's arguments seriously instead of settling them for you. Leonard is one of the best living readers of Milton, and this is the edition to actually read from. The cost: the endnotes mean flipping, and there is less help with the classical allusions than a first-timer sometimes wants. View on Amazon →
• Alastair Fowler (Longman Annotated English Poets). The authoritative scholarly text, based on the 1667 edition, with annotation so dense the commentary can occupy half a page. Nothing else tells you as much. The cost: it is a tool, not a reading copy. Working through it is like reading with a learned man interrupting every four lines.
• Gordon Teskey (Norton Critical Edition, second edition). A carefully modernised text with strong notes, followed by three centuries of criticism, most of the great quarrels included. The cost: the criticism is the reason to own it, and criticism is the wrong place to meet a poem for the first time.

Take Leonard to read it, Fowler to study it, Teskey to fight about it. The Folio Society has issued the poem with William Blake's watercolours, and again in two volumes with John Martin's mezzotints and a commentary by Fowler. Those are the objects to own. Neither is where you should begin.

Getting the Most From This Book

Skip the prose Arguments at the head of each book on a first reading. They were added after publication at the printer's request, and they lay out the contents of the book you are about to read. Come back to them afterwards.

Do not chase every allusion. Milton's first readers did not catch them all either.

Read the invocations that open the great books slowly. They are where Milton speaks as himself, blind and alone and asking for help, and they are the most moving lines in the poem.

The commonest mistake is to approach it as scripture with better lighting. It is an argument, made by a man with strong opinions who had lost everything defending them, and it wants to be argued with.