Core Course: English Literature/ 2013-14Target population: 1st year students, 2nd semesterSpecialization: Romanian/French-EnglishCourse Designer: Elena Butoescu

UNIT 1

ENGLISH PURITANISM JOHN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST (1667)

The Puritans wanted a purer kind of Christianity than the Reformation had brought to the country. They dreamt about that sort of Christianity which would not be tolerant; an austere religion which forbade easy pleasures and punished vice in the harshest possible way. The Protestantism of the Established Church derived a good deal from the German Luther, whose 'reforms' did not move too far away from traditional Christianity; but the Puritans followed John Calvin of Geneva, who taught that free will did not exist and that men were predestined from the beginning of time to go to either heaven or hell.

Puritanism was a variety of Protestantism, and Puritans were heirs of the Reformation inaugurated by Martin Luther’s seminal re-reading of Christianity’s foundational texts. Puritans affirmed the great slogans of Luther’s Reformation – sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura; faith alone, grace alone, scripture alone – though there was disagreement over exactly what these slogans entailed. Like Luther, they were intensely preoccupied with personal salvation, and convinced that God pardoned sinners in response to simple faith in Christ’s redeeming sacrifice on the Cross.

Following the Reformer, they repudiated the penitential system of Roman Catholicism – the mass, confession, absolution, penance, indulgences, pilgrimage, prayer to the saints, prayer for the dead, and purgatory. Indeed, most Puritans shared Luther’s conviction that the Papacy was the Antichrist predicted in the Book of Revelation. As a Puritan who valued the Bible more than anything else, John Milton considered the Bible “the only Book left us of divine authority.” Milton was disappointed with Restoration and later on, he rejected Puritanism and condemned all earthly tyrannies in the prophetic books concluding Paradise Lost.

It is likely that John Milton began writing his superb epic a year or two before the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and continued it in the years immediately following that event. Milton’s epic is pre-eminently a poem about knowing and choosing – for the Miltonic Bard, for his characters, and for the reader. It foregrounds education, a lifelong concern of Milton’s and of special importance to him after the Restoration as a means to help produce discerning, virtuous, liberty-loving human beings and citizens. Unlike any other literary or theological treatment of the Fall story, almost half the poem is given over to the formal education of Adam and Eve, by Raphael before and by Michael after the Fall. God himself takes on the role of educator as he engages in dialogue with his Son about humankind’s fall and redemption (3.80–265) and with Adam over his request for a mate (8.357–451). Adam and Eve’s dialogues with each other involve them in an ongoing process of self-education about themselves and their world. Milton educates his readers by exercising them in imaginative apprehension, rigorous judgment, and choice. By setting his poem in relation to other great epics and works in other genres he involves readers in a critique of the values associated with those other heroes and genres, as well as with issues of politics and theology.

Milton’s allusions in the Proems and throughout the poem continually acknowledge structural and verbal debts to the great classical models for epic or epic-like poems – Homer,

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Virgil, Hesiod, Ovid, Lucan, Lucretius – and to such moderns as Ariosto, Tasso, Du Bartas, Camoëns, and Spenser. Milton incorporates many epic topics and conventions from the Homeric and Virgilian epic tradition: an epic statement of theme, invocations both to the Muse Urania and to the great creating Spirit of God, an epic question, a beginning in medias res, a classical epic hero in Satan, a Homeric catalogue of Satan’s generals, councils in Hell and in Heaven, epic pageants and games, and supernatural powers – God, the Son, and good and evil angels. Also, a fierce battle in Heaven pitting loyal angels against the rebel forces, replete with chariot clashes, taunts and vaunts, hill-hurlings, and the single combats of heroes; narratives of past actions in Raphael’s accounts of the War in Heaven and the Creation; and Michael’s prophetic narrative of biblical history to come.

Yet the Bard claims in the opening Proem that he intends to surpass all those earlier epics, that his “adventrous Song” will soar “Above th’Aonian Mount” (1.13, 15). He clarifies what this means in the Proem to Book 9, as he takes pride in having eschewed “Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument / Heroic deem’d” and in having defined a new heroic standard, “the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom” (9.28–32). He has indeed given over the traditional epic subject, wars and empire, and the traditional epic hero as the epitome of courage and battle prowess. His protagonists are a domestic pair, the scene of their action is a pastoral garden, and their primary challenge is, “under long obedience tried,” to make themselves, their marital relationship, and their garden – the nucleus of the human world – ever more perfect. In this they fail, but at length they learn to understand and identify with the new heroic standard embodied in a series of heroes of faith and especially in the “greater man,” Christ, who will redeem humankind. For this radically new epic subject, as the Proems to Books 1, 3, 7, and 9 state, Milton hopes to obtain from the divine source of both truth and creativity the illumination and collaboration necessary to conceive a subject at once truer and more heroic than any other. He makes bold claims to originality as an author, but an author who is also a prophetic bard.

In addition to the new epic subject, Milton’s poem holds other surprises for its readers, then and now. First, and most striking, perhaps, is his splendid Satan, taken by many critics from the Romantic period to the early decades of the twentieth century as the intended or unintended hero of the poem. Milton presents him, especially in Books 1 and 2, as a figure of power, awesome size, proud and courageous bearing, regal authority, and, above all, magnificent rhetoric: this is no paltry medieval devil with grotesque physical features and a tail. He is described in terms of constant allusions to the greatest heroes – Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Prometheus, and others – in regard to the usual epic traits: physical prowess, battle courage, anger, fortitude, determination, endurance, leadership, and aristeia or battle glory. Through that presentation Milton engages readers in a poem-long exploration and redefinition of heroes and heroism, often by inviting them to discover how Satan in some ways exemplifies but in essence perverts those classical models. Moreover, Satan’s moving language of defiance against tyranny and laments for loss are powerfully attractive, posing readers the difficult challenge of discerning the discrepancies between Satan’s noble words and his motives and actions.

Milton’s representations of Hell, Heaven, and Eden also challenge readers’ stereotypes in his own age and ours. All these regions are in process: the physical conditions of the places are fitted to the beings that inhabit them, but the inhabitants interact with and shape their environments, creating societies in their own image. Hell is first presented in traditional terms, with the fallen angels chained on a lake of fire.

But unlike Dante’s Inferno, where the damned are confined within distinct circles to endure an eternally repeated punishment suited to their particular sins, Milton presents a damned society in the making. His fallen angels rise up and begin to mine gold and gems, build a government center, Pandæmonium, hold a parliament, send Satan on a mission of

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exploration and conquest, investigate their spacious and varied though sterile landscape, engage in martial games and parades, perform music, compose epic poems about their own deeds, and argue hard philosophical questions about fate and free will. Their parliament in Book 2 presents an archetype of debased and manipulated political assemblies and of characteristic political rhetoric through the ages. The powerful angelic peers debate issues of war and peace in the council chamber while the common angels are reduced to pygmy size outside. Moloch, the quintessential hawk, urges perpetual war at any cost; Belial counsels peace through ignominious inaction; Mammon would build up a rival empire in Hell founded on riches and magnificence but, ironically, describes that course of action in the language of republican virtue, as a choice of “Hard liberty before the easie yoke / Of servile Pomp” (2.256–7). Then Satan sways the council to his will through the agency of his chief minister, Beelzebub. The scene closes with Satan accorded divine honors in an exaggerated version of the idolatry Milton had long associated with the Stuart ideology of divine kingship.

Milton’s Heaven is even more surprising: instead of the expected stasis in perfection, it is also in process, requiring the continued and active choice of good, as Raphael explains to Adam: “My self and all th’ Angelic Host that stand / In sight of God enthron’d, our happie state / Hold, as you yours, while our obedience holds” (5.535–7). As a celestial city that combines courtly magnificence with the pleasures of nature, it offers an ideal of wholeness through a mix of heroic, georgic, and pastoral modes.

Milton’s StyleSeeking an “answerable style” for his “great Argument,” Milton produced rushing, enjambed, blank-verse lines that propel us along with few pauses for line endings or full stops, marked by elevated diction and complex syntax and by sonorities and sound patternings that make a magnificent music. He was clearly at pains to create an epic language suited to his exalted subject, a sublime high style of remarkable range whose energy and power will engulf us from the beginning. This style is created in part by dense allusiveness to classical myths, to biblical, historical, and literary names and stories, and to geographical places, ancient and contemporary, which import into the poem our associations with all those literary and physical worlds.

Milton devised for his poem a flexible blank-verse line with (almost always) ten syllables and a masculine or strong stress at the ends of lines. But the basic iambic rhythm (five weak and five strong stresses), is constantly varied by interspersing other rhythmic feet, so that some lines contain as few as three and others as many as eight strong stresses. The lines are organized into verse paragraphs of varying length, so that the reader encounters large units of verse at once, aided in this by Milton’s characteristic light punctuation. Milton also employs great freedom in the placement of caesuras (the pauses falling within the line) and he uses enjambment constantly, so that the sense is carried over from line to line.

Milton embeds dense layers of meaning in particular words by exploiting their Latin or Greek etymological senses. In the description of the rebel angels hurled from heaven “With hideous ruin,” “ruin” keeps its Latin etymological meaning, “falling,” along with its contemporary sense, “devastation.” Or in several descriptions of “horrid Arms” “horrid” means “terrible” but also keeps its Latin sense of “bristling” with spikes of flame. At times only the Latin sense is evoked, as when the rivers of Eden are said to run “With mazie error” (4.239): “error” here means “wandering,” not “mistake” or “fault.” Milton often plays with serious wit on the multiple meanings of a word, as in Adam’s honorific address to Eve, “Sole partner and sole part of all these joyes” (4.411), where “sole” first means “only” and then “unique,” probably with overtones of the homonym, “soul.” Later, in the throes of desperation after his xxviii Introduction fall, Adam invents a false etymology, deriving “evil” from Eve’s name: “O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give eare / To that false Worm” (9.1067–8).

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Into this elevated but very flexible grand epic style, Milton incorporated a wide range of other genres with their appropriate styles: lyrical and dramatic elements, hymns, formal debates, allegory, soliloquy, and elegy. If the Miltonic style is an organ sound, it is produced from a multitude of stops, even as the Miltonic epic incorporates, in accordance with Renaissance theory, a veritable encyclopedia of genres.

Paradise Lost and its influenceA poem is not a lecture; a story is not an argument. The way poems and stories work on our minds is not by logic, but by their capacity to enchant, to excite, to move, to inspire. To be sure, a sound intellectual underpinning helps the work to stand up under intellectual questioning, as Paradise Lost certainly does; but its primary influence is on the imagination. So it was, for instance, with the greatest of Milton’s interpreters, William Blake, for whom the author of Paradise Lost was a lifelong inspiration. ‘Milton lovd me in childhood & shewd me his face,’ he claimed, and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he wrote what is probably the most perceptive, and certainly the most succinct, criticism of Paradise Lost: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ And Blake’s continuing and passionate interest in Milton resulted in a long (and, frankly, difficult) poem named after the poet, as well as a series of illustrations to Paradise Lost which are some of the most delicate and beautiful water-colours he ever did.

Other poets at the same period felt the influence of Milton, Wordsworth in particular, who began one of his sonnets with the words: “Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee;” And very near the beginning of his own great long poem, The Prelude, Wordsworth deliberately echoes the phrase in the closing lines of Paradise Lost: “The earth is all before me . . . —as if he’s taking hold of a torch passed to him by Milton. Today, nearly three and a half centuries after Paradise Lost was first published, it is more influential than ever. Two separate dramatic adaptations have recently played on the stage in Britain. It will not go away.

Exam Topics:1. Focus on Milton's life and comment on the relationship between his life and his works.

Is the Puritan context of any importance in observing Milton's development as a writer?

2. How can you define Milton's style in Paradise Lost? What is the metre in Paradise Lost? Find examples in the poem.

3. Describe the events in Book 1 of Paradise Lost.

Bibliography:Coffey, John, Paul C. H. Lim (Eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2008.Danielson, Dennis. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989.Milton, John. Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books. Philadelphia: Hayes and Zell

Publishers, 1854.Milton, John. Paradise Lost. An Illustrated Edition with an Introduction by Philip Pullman.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Barbara K. Lewalski. London: Blackwell, 2007.

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