In brief
John Milton’s epic takes the three short chapters that open Genesis and makes of them more than ten thousand lines of unrhymed verse. It begins in the middle, with Satan chained on a burning lake, and moves through a parliament of devils, a flight across Chaos, a war in Heaven, the making of the world, a marriage in a garden, one bite of fruit and the long walk out. Its stated aim, in the first paragraph, is to “justifie the wayes of God to men”.
The free text linked here is H. C. Beeching’s Oxford edition on Project Gutenberg. Its wording and old spelling follow the first edition of 1667, its division into twelve books follows the second edition of 1674, and notes after each book record what 1674 changed. Quotations below come from that text, odd spelling included.
The argument
Milton’s case against God’s accusers rests on a single line that God speaks about Adam: “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” Nobody was forced, so nobody can complain. That defence of freedom comes from a writer who had argued in print for divorce, an unlicensed press and the trial of a king.
The view taken here is that the defence does not succeed and that the poem is better for it. God, when he speaks, argues like a lawyer retained on his own behalf. The energy lies elsewhere: in a rebel who speaks Milton’s own language of liberty, and in two people who have to go on being married after the worst thing has happened. The great claim is the modest one at the end, where the angel Michael offers Adam “A Paradise within thee, happier farr.” A man who had seen his republic fall was not promising victory. He was saying what can be kept when there is none.
The twelve books
Books I and II: Hell
Satan wakes on the lake, rallies his army and builds Pandemonium. In council, Moloch says “My sentence is for open Warr”, Belial argues for what the narrator calls “ignoble ease”, Mammon for making the best of Hell, and Beelzebub carries the plan already agreed: attack God’s new creature. Satan volunteers, meets Sin and Death at the gate, and crosses Chaos.
Book III: Light
Book III opens with Milton’s address to the light he cannot see. In Heaven the Father foresees the fall and the Son offers to die for it.
Book IV: Eden
Satan lands, and doubts: “Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell”. Then, deciding, “Evil be thou my Good”. He watches Adam and Eve, overhears them, and is caught at night “Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve”.
Books V to VIII: Raphael
The angel Raphael comes to lunch and tells Adam the back-story: the rebellion, the lone dissenter Abdiel, the three days’ war in which devils invent cannon, the Creation. In Book VIII Adam asks about the stars, is told to “be lowlie wise”, and tells his own story of waking and asking for a mate.
Books IX and X: the Fall
The couple argue over working apart. The serpent finds Eve alone; she eats, and “Earth felt the wound”. Adam eats knowing what he does, because “Flesh of Flesh, Bone of my Bone thou art”. In Book X the Son judges, Satan goes home to boast and is answered by “A dismal universal hiss” as his army turns to snakes, and Adam cries “Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay”, the line Mary Shelley would put on a title page.
Books XI and XII: Michael
Michael shows Adam the future: murder, disease, the Flood, and then in Book XII Abraham, Moses and Christ, told rather than shown. Then they leave: “The World was all before them”.
Blindness and dictation
Milton was totally blind by 1652, at forty-three, in the middle of his work as Latin secretary to the Commonwealth. The poem was therefore never seen by its author. It was composed in the head and dictated to a series of helpers and friends, a passage at a time. An often-repeated story has him complaining, when his helper came late, that he wanted to be milked. The anecdote’s origin is hard to pin down, but it fits what he says himself.
Milton describes the process in the poem. His muse pays “Her nightly visitation unimplor’d, / And dictates to me slumbring”, and the result is “Easie my unpremeditated Verse”. The verse does not look unpremeditated, but dictation leaves a mark: long sentences that hold their grammar across many lines are what a mind trained on Latin can carry in the ear. Book III turns the fact into its subject: “Seasons return, but not to me returns”.
The plan itself was far older. His nephew Edward Phillips reported that Satan’s speech to the sun in Book IV, “O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd”, was written about 1642 for a drama on the Fall. John Aubrey dates the bulk of it to 1658 to 1663.
The Restoration
Charles II returned in May 1660, and Milton had more to fear than most. He had publicly defended the execution of Charles I in Eikonoklastes and the Defensio, and weeks before the king landed he was still printing The Ready and Easy Way to keep a republic. He went into hiding. Parliament ordered his arrest and those books were burned by the hangman. He was spared by the Act of Indemnity, arrested anyway and briefly imprisoned, and got out through friends who probably included Andrew Marvell.
The poem was finished in that defeat, and says so. In Book VII, the narrator is “On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compast round”. He hopes for “fit audience find, though few”. It would be a mistake to read the poem as a code, but it is not politically innocent. Satan speaks the language of liberty against a monarch; Abdiel, “Among the faithless, faithful only hee”, stands alone as Milton had; Nimrod in Book XII is the first king and a tyrant. Readers argue over whether the rhetoric of Hell confesses that the revolution’s language was corruptible. The book was licensed by a chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury all the same, with Book I’s eclipse that “Perplexes Monarchs” left standing.
Milton sold it to the printer Samuel Simmons on 27 April 1667 for £5, with a further £5 due as each print run sold.
1667 and 1674
The first edition has ten books and, at first, no prefatory matter at all. Readers were puzzled enough that Simmons, reissuing the remaining copies in 1668, added summaries called Arguments and a short note explaining why the poem did not rhyme.
The second edition of 1674, “Revised and Augmented”, split the old Book VII into VII and VIII and the old Book X into XI and XII. A few new lines make the joins at the start of Books VIII and XII. It also moved the Arguments to the front of each book, added commendatory verses including Marvell’s, added three lines to the vision of disease in Book XI, and made small changes, such as “hospitable Dores Yielded thir Matrons” becoming “hospitable door Expos’d a Matron” in Book I. Milton died that November.
The change of structure matters more than the words. Twelve is Virgil’s number, and the split gives the poem a clear second half beginning with Creation in Book VII. Modern editions usually print 1674, so a line in Beeching’s reprint can differ from a school copy.
Blank verse
Milton’s note on the verse, added in 1668, is one of the most aggressive prefaces in English. Rhyme is “the Invention of a barbarous Age”, a thing of “the jingling sound of like endings”. His own measure is “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.” The vocabulary of bondage and liberty is the vocabulary of his pamphlets, applied to prosody.
Taken strictly, “the first in English” overreaches. Blank verse begins with the Earl of Surrey’s translation of the Aeneid in the 1540s and belongs to the stage of Marlowe and Shakespeare. Milton’s claim is really that nobody had written an original English epic in it, and the fashion of his own day, led by Dryden, was for rhyming couplets. The claim holds for what he made of it: the sense “variously drawn out from one Verse into another”, line endings that hang and turn, whole paragraphs as the unit of thought.
The Satan debate
Satan’s claim on the reader has produced the richest argument in Milton criticism. He has the opening books, “Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n”, and “The mind is its own place”. William Blake, around 1790, said Milton wrote in fetters of angels and God and at liberty of devils, “because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. Shelley, in the Defence of Poetry of 1821, went further on moral grounds: “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God” as a sufferer who persists is to a victor who takes revenge.
C. S. Lewis replied in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) that this is a modern reader’s failure. Satan is meant to be absurd, and he traces the decline: “From hero to general, from general to politician, from politician to secret service agent, and thence to a thing that peers in at bedroom or bathroom windows, and thence to a toad, and finally to a snake”. William Empson’s Milton’s God (1961) turned the attack on God himself: “The reason why the poem is so good is that it makes God so bad.” Stanley Fish, in Surprised by Sin (1967), moved the question to the reader, who is meant to be seduced by Satan’s speeches, corrected by the narrator, and made to feel his own fallen state at every turn. Fish makes Milton’s control total, which is the weakness of the reading.
The position here is that Lewis is right about the arc and Blake about the energy. Book IV’s soliloquy shows a mind that knows exactly what it has done, and no caricature speaks like that.
Eve
Eve is where modern reading of the poem has moved furthest. The notorious line is the narrator’s: “Hee for God only, shee for God in him”. Her first speech tells how she woke, looked into a pool, fell for “A Shape within the watry gleam” and was led away to a man she thought less fair. Critics have read this as vanity planted early. It can equally be read as a self discovering itself, and her first thought is not of Adam.
The separation scene in Book IX shows her reasoning well about freedom, in terms close to Areopagitica, and Adam yielding to it. The serpent’s flattery works on her ambition, not her stupidity. After the fall, the turn comes from her: “Forsake me not thus, Adam”, and she is the first to take the blame and to ask for peace, which breaks the cycle of accusation. Book X’s reconciliation is the poem’s real answer to Satan, who never does this. Hers are the last words spoken in the poem: “By mee the Promis’d Seed shall all restore.”
Virginia Woolf’s phrase about “Milton’s bogey” in A Room of One’s Own gave Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar the title of a chapter in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which reads the poem as the founding myth of patriarchal authority and traces women writers’ anxiety about it. Others, among them Diane McColley in Milton’s Eve (1983), defend her capacity. The hierarchy is stated, and the drama keeps undoing it.
The others
Adam
Adam is the harder character to like and the more tragic choice. He falls with his eyes open, out of love, and his despair in Book X, “O miserable of happie!”, is the poem’s most human long speech.
The Father and the Son
The Father is the poem’s accepted failure, a legal voice defending itself before it has been charged. The Son acts: he offers himself, ends the war alone, and comes down to judge and clothe the pair. The treatise attributed to Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, printed only in 1825, holds the Son subordinate to the Father, and the poem leaves room for that.
Sin and Death
Sin, born from Satan’s head, and Death, their child who rapes her, are grotesque allegory in the middle of an epic. Johnson thought this a fault. It is also the poem’s most frightening family scene.
Readers and critics
Samuel Johnson’s life of Milton (1779) ranked the poem’s design first and its performance second among human productions, and then admitted: “None ever wished it longer than it is.” The Romantics took the rebel, and Wordsworth the voice. Keats gave up on the Miltonic manner as too artificial for him.
T. S. Eliot’s essay of 1936 called him a great poet and a bad influence, and F. R. Leavis pressed the charge. Eliot softened his view in a British Academy lecture of 1947, and the attempt to dislodge Milton failed.
Afterlives
John Dryden had turned the poem into The State of Innocence, a rhymed opera libretto never staged, by 1677. Blake and Gustave Doré are its great illustrators.
The most lasting afterlife is Frankenstein, whose creature reads the poem and takes himself for Adam and for Satan. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials takes its title from Book II, “His dark materials to create more Worlds”, and treats the Fall as liberation.
How to read it
- Read it aloud. Do not stop at the ends of lines. It was composed for the ear.
- Start with Books I, II, IV and IX. Then go back for the rest, and do not skip Books X and XII, where the poem finds its ending.
- Choose your text. The linked Beeching text keeps Milton’s spelling and the 1667 readings. Project Gutenberg also has the true ten-book text and a modern-spelling text with the 1674 additions, whose source that file itself says could not be traced.
- Get notes. The free John Milton Reading Room at Dartmouth is annotated throughout. In print, Gordon Teskey’s Norton Critical Edition is the practical choice and Alastair Fowler’s Longman edition the fullest commentary.
Read next
- Homer, The Odyssey (c. 700 BC). The model of an epic that begins in the middle and tells its back-story at a meal.
- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (c. 1320). The other Christian epic of exile, with a very different Satan, frozen and speechless.
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818). Adam’s complaint made into a novel, with the creature as the wronged party.
- John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671). The sequel, prompted by the Quaker Thomas Ellwood’s question about Paradise found, a short poem in which temptation is refused.