Milton: Paradise Lost (1667)

 Paradise Lost is an epic poem by the 17th-century English poet John Milton, published in 1667. In its most creative fashion, it supplemented the biblical story of the origin and the Fall of Man, and imaginatively explains how and why Adam and Eve are tempted by the fallen angel Satan and thereby their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It is considered to be Milton's masterpiece, solidifying his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of all time. Joining us today is Dr. David Loewenstein, Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities at Penn State University.

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Paradise Lost

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Thanks for tuning in to the global novel. I'm Claire Hennessy. Paradise lost is an epic poem by the 17th century English boy John Milton, published in 1667. In its most creative fashion is supplemented the biblical story of the origin and the fall of man, and explains how and why Adam and Eve are tempted by the falling Angel Satan, and thereby their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It is considered to be Milton's masterpiece, solidifying his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of all time. Joining us today is Dr. David. Loewenstein. Edwin Earle Sparks professor of English and Humanities at Penn State University. 

Thanks for joining us, David, could you tell us more about yourself and your relationship with Paradise Lost?

Well, thank you, Claire for inviting me to be to be on this program. With its its wide global reach. And so I'm very happy to be on it and to talk about paradise lost to a wide ranging audience. Well, for one thing I'm editing Paradise Lost right now for Oxford University Press. So this is a new, a new edition of the poem. The poem was first published in 1667. And then, restructured by Milton himself into 12 books, in 1674. And this is the first edition to bring together the first lifetime editions, the first editions published during Milton's lifetime to bring them together and juxtapose them and talk about the implications of them. But I've been teaching and writing on Paradise Lost on and off really for throughout my whole career. So it's a poem I've worked on for a long time.

Your own words, what is Paradise Lost about and what it means for modern readers?

Well, that's a very good question it. Paradise Lost is obviously about the, in a sense is about the exploration of human origins, even going in some sense beyond the terse details of the Bible and the Book of Genesis. But what it means to modern readers, can be obviously a variety of variety of things, I want to just touch on several possibilities. For one thing, it's really very much a poem about human freedom, and human choice, and human responsibility. And when I say human freedom, of course, we hear the word freedom all the time in America, it's being used by different political groups that has different kinds of meanings and so on. For Milton, human freedom also had a range of meanings. That included theological freedom, the freedom to actually have some agency that would, would lead to your own lead to your own salvation. And this was a reaction against some of the severe reformation theology of say, of Luther and Calvin, but also freedom to choose in the sense of choose your own religious behavior, your own religious rituals or lack of rituals. And, and also political freedom was crucial. The Milton was a writer who emerged from the period of the English revolution when the when, in fact, the King of England Charles the First was executed and was seen as tyrannical and authoritarian and so on. And Milton was a great believer in in political freedom. He wasn't a Democrat, but he still believed in political freedom in the sense of being able to choose or to get rid of your, your political leader if he or she turned out to be unworthy. There's another way in which I think Paradise Lost, can perhaps speak to modern readers. And this is something I thought of rather recently when I saw the remarkable images of the James Webb telescope. And the reason I mentioned this is that Milton was clearly interested in astronomy and science. And he was interested in the debates about astronomy, in the early modern period, that is, debates that were stimulated by Copernicus, and Galileo. Galileo, of course, was was an astronomer and mathematician who observed the moon as well as Jupiter and the stars around it, and so on, and basically opened up a whole kind of new sky as it were, that challenge the traditional Ptolemaic and Aristotelian in view of the cosmos. And for one thing, of course, Galileo challenged the idea that the earth was the center of the universe and so on. And instead, Galileo, Galileo emphasized as Copernicus had done, that the that the Earth moves, and it revolves around the sun. Now, why do I mention all of this? Well, all this comes up in in Paradise Lost. And in fact, Milton had made a trip to Europe in 1638, and 1639, when he was a young man, and had in fact, met Galileo.  And Galileo was at that point under house arrest. Because his writings and his discoveries, its dramatic discoveries, and basically seem to be heretical, and of course, again, challenged, traditional worldview. And so Milton, admired Galileo, and Galileo is the only other person besides modern person besides Milton himself, who's actually mentioned in Paradise Lost, that he's mentioned three times, or alluded to three times in Paradise Lost. So but to get back to your question, why this might all matter to modern readers? Well, Milton was interested in the speculation about the cosmos, and about inquiries into the nature of the cosmos interested in astronomy, clearly, as I said, and he actually creates a kind of debate in the eighth book of Paradise Lost between Adam are our first father, and an angel Rafael who comes down who's sent down by God, basically to, to educate Adam and Eve, sent down to earth. And the education involves the education about the cosmos about astronomy. But what's interesting in this debate, and one of the things that really struck me recently, in viewing those amazing images from the James Webb telescope, was that, you know, we have this intense curiosity about the limitations of the universe, of course, we're finding out more and more about the universe and about other galaxies and so on. Adam himself, by the way, is an amateur astronomer, and he is very interested in finding out more about the universe. And Rafael allows him to ask questions about it. And this is in Book VIII of Paradise Lost. But I think one of the things that's interesting about Paradise Lost is that Rafeal he condones or he allows astronomical speculation. And again, and he does so in a way, by the way, that clearly highlights some of Galileo's discoveries. He's basically he says to Adam, what if, in fact, it's really the earth, that moves around the sun, and the sun is the center of the universe. And he mentioned the fact that there is a terrestrial Moon, which is, of course, very crucial, and Galileo's writings, that is the idea that the moon and the landscape for the moon scape, it has got mountains and valleys and so on, that was also that was the moon was not just a perfect spherical, celestial body as it is in Aristotelian cosmology. So all of this comes out in the course of the dialogue between Adam and the angel about astronomy. But the angel also says to Adam, you know, it's really important that you take care of the fruitful Earth. You'll be lonely, lowly wise, and he says, dream not of other worlds and so on and the creatures that might live there. And so, and I mentioned all of this because Paradise Lost asked in a way, one of the ways I think it can speak to us is that it kind of opens up a kind of dialogue between the degree to which we care about the world before us. And the degree to which we are fascinated by the limitations or the lack of limitations of the universe. And, you know, at a moment when our world is basically burning up, we're we're not very good guardians of our own world. There's there you could say, in a sense, Paradise Lost, underscores that we also need to be lonely, why as we need to be better guardians of our own world, even as we engage in astronomical inquiry. So that would I just mentioned this, because again, because it was because of the James Webb images. And I began to think that really think of Paradise Lost in these terms, and that it was, in a sense, raising this kind of these kinds of questions. How do you value the world before us the fruitful Earth, as the angel calls it, at versus engaging in speculation about the speculation about the universe.

So understanding Milton's time and his career is the key to understanding Paradise Lost, and appreciating his complexity as a great work of art. We're looking at an era that is known according to the Western literary tradition, as the early modern period. And this tumultuous historical junction is marked with major religious transformation, and cultural renaissance. So what are the key historical events and contexts that undergird Paradise Lost's rich aesthetic and political complexity? You think?

Well, let me highlight two. First of all, there is the Reformation in Europe and of course, in England and really, the right word for would be reformation, that there were multiple reformations that took place. But they were really sparked by in the early 16th century, Luther and Calvin, who obviously rejected the authority of the Church of Rome. And of course, there were many other Protestant reformers are exceedingly for example, who took somewhat different positions, particularly on the Eucharist or the mass. But the Reformation itself also generated a kind of fierce debate about the nature of human freewill. And in the in the 1520s, for example, there is an intense debate between Erasmus, who is one of the great European humanists and one of the great European writers and Martin Luther. And Martin Luther is very scornful of Erasmus because Erasmus wants to allow for some element of human agency when it comes to matters of salvation. Whereas, of course, Luther sees God is not only remote, but God as a kind of, you know, an all powerful God who does not allow any kind of human agency. And then when you have Calvin Of course, you particularly get the idea of predestination being highlighted, though it's there and also in Luther, but, and that is that you are predestined to either damnation or salvation and most of us are predestined to damnation, it's a pretty, it's a pretty in some ways, frightening kind of theological perspective. And I mentioned all of this because these issues then get dramatized in Paradise Lost itself. I've already mentioned how important human free will when it comes to salvation is and in fact, Paradise Lost is, among other things, a theological epic, and that is that in Book Three of Paradise Lost, there is a debate between God the Father and the Son of God. And it is all about the nature of human freedom when it comes to salvation, as well as God saying that I will have nothing to do with predestination. So God Milton's God is rejecting reformation and predestination. And so, in a way, the very intense debate between Luther and Erasmus who again wanted to make some room for human free will, when it came to matters of salvation. That anticipates really the kind of key theological subject matter of Paradise Lost. Now, another crucial context, which is related to this, in a sense, is the period of the English revolution in the mid 17th century from about 1614 to 1660. This is a time of enormous upheaval, of course, it's also a time of civil war. When parliament is engaged in civil war against Charles first. So it's a time of political upheaval. But it's also a time of political of I should say it's a time of religious fragmentation and the fragmentation of Protestantism within England. And what I mean by that is, by, certainly by 1600, if not before England was basically a Protestant country. You go back to the early 16th centuries, the Catholic country, a Queen Elizabeth comes to the Queen 1558 is a Protestant queen. But in the English revolution, you have different Protestant groups who are trying to break away from the state or the established church of England. And some of these Protestant groups are quite radical. The most obvious of these groups are the one that still is around all over the world, or the Quakers. The Quakers emerge during the English revolution. And they of course, completely reject the idea of a national church. Milton also rejected the idea of a national church. And the English revolution is a time of enormous religious and political upheaval. And I mentioned that as an important context for Paradise Lost because Milton is beginning to write Paradise Lost at the end of the 1650s. He's also engaged in writing political and religious tracts during the English revolution, in a sense, becomes more radicalized as a result of the English revolution. He ends up writing tracts that defend the experimental English Republic that is established after Charles the First is executed in 1649. And he also he also ends up writing tracks that defend different Protestant groups and Protestant sects. And he also writes tracks that defend the liberty of conscience, that no civil or ecclesiastical power should be able to force a conscience. And these kinds of issues and themes play an important part in Paradise Lost because Paradise Lost, among other things is although it's, it's about the fall of humankind, and its tragic consequences. It's also a poem that's in waves, highly political, Satan's rebellion against God is highly political. Satan uses political languages, not just the language of kind of royalism and so on. But also the language of republicanism you use he manipulates different political languages. And these political languages owed a great deal to the upheavals of the English English revolution. And the emphasis that you get in Paradise Lost in places on human freedom when it comes to worship, or religious practice. For example, in book five of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve, don't have any kind of Church of England rituals. Now I might observe the Paradise Lost is published during the restoration. That means the time in which the Church of England had been reestablished. And the king of England had come back, this was the son of Charles the First. This was Charles the second. So the restoration which Milton by the way resisted Of course, the restoration had occurred, beginning in 1660. So the Paradise Lost is actually a restoration poem, in a sense, but it's a product of the English revolution. And in many ways, it's antithetical to the restoration.

right. As you just mentioned, Paradise Lost is purposefully written without a rhyme. So what does this subversive and unconventional form try to tell us? And what are the price and risks of manifesting oneself as unconventional especially for Milton at the time?

Yes, well, that's that's a good question. Paradise Lost is definitely written without rhyme and in fact, readers of Paradise Lost, the first edition of Paradise Lost the 1667 edition of Paradise Lost. Wonder why it was written without rhyme and the reason we know that very well, is that Milton was asked to add a note on the verse, which he did, by the way, and it was added to the first edition of Paradise Lost, which went through a number of issues. Before it, Milton actually restructured the poem into 12 books is first published in 10 books, by the way. And in one of those issues in 1668. Milton adds this note on verse no doubt because the printer, the publisher, and the printer of his poem asked him to do so because readers were saying, why doesn't this poem rhyme? And it was, in fact, the custom of the time for heroic poems to rhyme and And so a great contemporary of Milton's John Dryden is a great poet who writes in heroic couplets. And in Milton's no down rhyme, Milton says, I'm not going to conform to this restoration convention, I'm not going to use rhyme. One thing he actually says is that first of all, Homer and Virgil did not use rhyme. So this is one of the ways in which Milton was saying, my poem was a great classic. But it's a great classic in the sense of going back to Homer and Virgil and not using rhyme. The thing that's also interesting about the, the note on verse is that he uses political language. And he says, that he is going to recover the heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming, uses the language of bondage as opposed to oh, well, obviously, implying the opposite freedom without rhyme. You know, you're of course you are, in a sense, an advocate or a poet of freedom. So Milton is being polemical, he was polemical, in his prose writings of the 1640s and 50s. He's been polemical, in the note on verse, and he's basically saying, I'm going to go against the grain. I'm not going to be a restoration conformist, but as a result, my poem to some extent, is only a great classic, but it's the kind of truer reformed epic, because it really muddles itself on Homer and Virgil in that respect.

So, in your work, especially the study guide to Milton, you mentioned that Milton's biblical subject was not only historically sound, but also international in its own interest.

How so? Well, Milton had thought about writing a national epic. And he, in fact, in the 1640s, had said that he wanted to write a poem, or an indie dramas that were doctrinal to the nation. So he had thought about writing a national tome. He thought about writing a poem that was based on the life of King Arthur. He turned away from that he gradually had doubts about whether Arthur really was it really existed. But I think also, he became increasingly disillusioned with the idea of writing a kind of national poem. I mean, if he were to write a national poem, say at the end of the 1650s, and 1660s, when he's writing paradise, well, he couldn't write a national poem. But Oliver Cromwell, even though Milton had praised Cromwell, he had given Cromwell some strong advice in the 1650s. But Oliver Cromwell was the great Puritan leader of the time. And he was the one who was the, in a sense, the leader of the Army, what was called the New Model Army that had beaten, beaten Charles the First and beaten the loyalists. But reading an epic poem on Cromwell will not have gone over particularly well and, of course, would have gotten Milton into trouble during the restoration. Because after all, again, Milton was well known for writing these radical political and religious tracks. And, you know, at the time of the restoration is radical political tracts were actually burned, they were ordered, burned publicly in 1660. So Milton instead chose to write about a much more international sort of theme or topic that is the full of humankind, its tragic consequences, and to base it upon the Bible, so international, because Bible, of course, was known all over not only known all over Europe, but at least and especially in Protestant Europe. The Bible, of course, had greater authority than, say, the church of Rome. And so in that sense, the Bible and the stories in the Bible had a really transnational kind of transnational appeal. And one thing I should say about the Reformation, by the way, is the Reformation also stimulated the reading of the Bible by laypersons, and translations of the Bible, the Bible was translated into English, by William Tyndale, early, early 16th century. And then of course, as I'm sure many of your viewers know about the authorized version, which is translated in 1611, authorized by James the First and so on. But you know, when you have Bibles translated into vernacular languages, you are going to make the Bible even more accessible to lay persons. So by choosing a biblical topic, the fall of humankind, and in effect, choosing that topic and going beyond the Bible, because the Bible is cryptic and elliptical, in those early chapters of Genesis, and expanding that story and giving it much more psychological nuance and emotional nuance. Milton was not only taking a more transnational or international topic, but he was treating it in his own original way. That doesn't mean as I've already suggested, in some of my other remarks, that Paradise Lost doesn't have all sorts of political implications, but eventually had a much wider appeal, and an appeal that was not necessarily partisan, because of its topic. So and I'll just give you one example. And your viewers one example, in 1688. There's a very large, folio, big, big edition of Paradise Lost with illustrations published, and it's also got a loss of over 500 subscribers. Quite amazing. This was an unusual kind of way of publishing. And many of these subscribers were people who were utterly completely unsympathetic to Milton's politics and his religious beliefs, and his radicalism. But paradise was lost as being treated as a kind of great national epic. And all these subscribers are getting out. One of them is driving himself to write some verses on the title appear on the title page. And I mentioned this because Milton had chosen this biblical topic that could then appeal not only to a restoration to centers, and that we know that it did some, but it could also appeal to a broader, more ideologically diverse audience.

When Milton began to formally write Paradise Lost in his mid 50s, he became blind, what does it mean to be blind for a poet? And how the philosophical dichotomy of darkness and light, physical blindness and spiritual enlightenment is reflected in the poem?

Yeah, blindness is really extremely important for Milton and for Paradise Lost. And when you read Paradise lost, and particularly the great invocations to Paradise Lost there for them, beginning with the opening invocation of the poem, or where Milton speaks about how he is dark and low. And, and that suggestion of darkness, of course, also refers to his blindness. He also has a remarkable invocation to light that's the invocation of Book Three of paradise loss, where he's really writing about the origins of his creativity, and the need for inner illumination. Because he's blind. Nolan struggled with his blindness and his enemies during the English revolution, said that his blindness was basically a punishment for writing in favor of the regicide the killing of Charles the First. Milton, on the other hand, countered that by saying that his blindness was a mark of kind of prophetic sacredness, and he compared himself to blind prophets and so on. But he clearly struggled with his blindness. And in Paradise Lost, he also struggles with his blindness to his blindness, you could say, well, it obviously can underscore his sense of frailty and vulnerability. But it also can become an opportunity for creativity. And Milton is invocation of light. And Book Three asks that God shine his light in inwardly shine that illuminate Milton, so that he can see Intel of things invisible, the mortal sight, which in some sense, he does, he actually soars all the way up to heaven. And book three of Paradise Lost, of course, as he relates the depicts God and relates to the debate between God and the Father and so on. In the invocation to light he he says that he's been presented with a universal blank. So that while he, you know, while he feels an enormous sense of loss, he's cut off from the cheerful ways of many says, so he feels a sense of loss, which, by the way, allows him to establish a parallel between himself and Adam and the Eve, their loss of Eden, his loss of his blindness. But since he's being presented with a universal blank, he's also saying that blindness is an opportunity to fill in that universal blank as at work, and it's an opportunity for enormous creativity. In that sense, it's really a kind of mixed thing, but there's no question that Milton probes and explores and writes about his blindness and key moments in paradise loss. I should just quickly add, as you can probably surmise, from what I've said, Milton tends to write a lot about himself, he puts himself into his own poetic and prose creations, and he's very much present as a blind poet in Paradise Lost, but in this case, is a blind poet who also seeks and claims that he has prophetic visionary powers.

What is Milton's theological treaties and how his iconoclastic belief and modification of the absolute power of God is reflected in Paradise Lost?

Well, Milton's longest word, in fact, is a theological treatise he wrote, called the de Doctrina Christiana, which is basically on Christian doctrine, because the treatise had some pretty heretical ideas in it. It couldn't be published in Milton's lifetime. And fact it was not published until 1820. Five, but Milton was working on his his theological trees in the 1650s may have been revising a little bit in the 1660s. The theological treatise really helps to illuminate aspects of Milton's theology in Paradise Lost. And it shows for example, the kind of emphasis that that Milton places on human freewill cores, freewill theology, again, against reformation, some of the standard views of reformation theology clearly shows Milton against the idea of predestination, typical Calvinist or Lutheran predestination, it also emphasizes the it takes apart or deconstructs the Trinity. So Milton is anti Trinitarian, that the Son of God is not co eternal with the Father. He's subordinate to the father, he's not all knowing. Now for us, we might shrug our shoulders and not think that means a great deal. But you could get into great deal of trouble if you were anti-Trinitarian, because first of all, the Church of England emphasized emphasize the Trinity. And it did so in the Book of Common Prayer. Whereas by the way, Milton said, Look, if you go back to the Bible, and Milton's Christian doctrine, shows Milton constantly going back to the Bible to sort of develop his theological ideas, you go back to the Bible, there's no evidence for the Trinity. But as I was saying, you could get into a great deal of trouble for being anti Trinitarian. That was also, by the way, true in Europe. But it was certainly true in England, so that, for example, the founder of my state, William Penn, a Quaker, was in the Tower of London for a good many months in 1668, for writing a track, which basically defended anti anti Trinitarian ism and argued rather like Milton in his Christian doctrine, that there's no evidence in the Bible for the Trinity. Some of the key theological ideas in Paradise Lost, are worked out in a kind of systematic way in the Christian doctrine, and then they take on a kind of poetic or dramatic expression in Paradise Lost, such as when Milton dramatizes the persons of the Godhead in Book Three of Paradise Lost. So you've got this debate between the father and son, it's really a kind of dramatic debate between the father and son. And so some of the key ideas of Christian doctrine are then dramatized there and the Son of God, by the way, in Book Three of Paradise Lost, he's not old knowing he basically asked God's questions, God's theology is doctrines. Are you going to go ahead and allow Satan to destroy your world and destroy Adam and Eve, you know, I mean, the Son of God ask this as though he doesn't, doesn't altogether know. He can't foresee all the way in the future the way that God can. It's an anti-Trinitarian son, which by the way, early readers of paradise there were some early readers of Paradise Lost who picked up on this even though they didn't know or have access to Milton's Christian doctrine. That's right.

That's right. So how different is paradise lost from Homer and Virgil's epics, as you just mentioned?

Well, Paradise Lost owes a great deal to Homer and Virgil. But it's also very different from Homer and Virgil. You could say elements of Homer and Virgil get worked into Paradise Lost, and in some sense critiqued in Paradise Lost. Homer's Iliad, of course, is you could argue our greatest poem about warfare, and Paradise Lost as a whole book book six, which is devoted to warfare. It's the war in heaven, in which Satan and the rebel angels fight against God and His loyal angels. And Satan is Rebel angels, and very, to some extent, they pursue glory. They also they also are pursued revenge, and particularly Satan does after he's been ejected from heaven, so that Satan and his rebel angels tend to be associated with the martial values of Homeric epic. Now, Satan also makes a great journey to earth once once he's been banished to hell. And then, of course, he is a kind of emissary on behalf of the fallen angels, who makes this journey from hell to Earth. And he's obviously going to conquer humankind. It's a long and difficult journey, that to some extent, you could say, based on the Odyssey, the idea of a kind of great epic journey, and so on. But Satan is also a kind of an imperialist. He's going to conquer, conquer the world. And he's going to conquer Adam and Eve and enslave them as it were, destroy their world, you know, in a way, he's a kind of perverse representation of India's the kind of hero of Virgil's Aeneid, who's pious of course, but also is on the, in the process of founding a kind of new empire after Troy has destroyed the Imperial values that might be associated with with Virgil, for example, as well as other epic poet poets who followed Virgil, for example, Lucia ads published in 1572, the great Portuguese national, and Imperial epic, was about Vasco de Gama. And his journey around the Cape of you're really around Africa all the way to India, is an epic of empire. And so, in a sense, of course, Lucia also owes something clearly to Virgil. And so the point I'm making is that the whole the Virgilian epic Imperial tradition is also critiqued in in Paradise Lost because it's, its values tend to be associated with with Satan. But having said that, obviously, Milton did admire Virgil, and he restructured his poem. So it has 12 books, and virtuals. In it also has 12 books. You know, Milton clearly owes a lot to Homer and Virgil. But obviously, he's basically engaged in a kind of critique of the tribal glory, revenge Imperial conquest values associated with Homer and Virgil. So that in the end, Paradise Lost owes a lot to classical epic, but also clearly divergence from classical epic and some of its martial and aristocratic values.

Interesting. How does Milton's long poem differ in crucial ways from that other long poem highly popular in the Renaissance, the romantic epic? 

Well, it doesn't it in a number of important ways, but I think, first it's important important, I think, to emphasize it, Milton knew the rope romance or romantic epic. Romantic epics, he knew the Italian epics of you know, Tasso he greatly admired Tasso Ariosto. These greatly 16th century epic chivalric epics. And obviously, he knew Spencer Edmund spenser's Faerie Queen. Well, he was, you know, and he had thought about writing a chivalric epic, based on the, on the life of King Arthur, and up until the end of the 1630s, he was clearly thinking of doing this. And so he was attracted to the chivalric epic. By the time he gets to Paradise Lost, you know, he really ends up diverging in in a number of really striking ways from the chivalric epic. Now, this makes a bit a bit of sense because, you know, chivalric epics like Aereo Stowe and Tasso Tasos epic Jerusalem Delivered as about the First Crusade to liberate Jerusalem at the end of the at the end of the 11th century. And it's really you know, these are epics about love and war in relation to the conflict between Christians and Muslims. This was nothing was obviously not going to pursue this. I mean, this is or this was not ultimately the subject matter Milton was going to choose since he chose after, as we've talked about earlier to to write about the biblical epic, you know, he greatly admired Spencer, as I've said, Because Spencer's epic, taught him much about the issues of temptation and trial, which are very important in paradise loss. You can't just take your virtue for granted you have to it has to be proved, and there has to be a process of temptation. So Spencer, you know, Spencer was an important teacher for Milton, and a kind of an important poetic teacher for Milton. But you know, Spencer also was writing an allegorical epic that had national significance, and Paradise Lost doesn't have allegory in it, for example, uses allegory to write about the family life, perverse family life of sin, I mean of Satan, who, whose progeny are sin and death. This occurs at the end of Book Two where you get the allegory of Satan and sin and death. And ultimately, it's an allegory that sort of shows shows it knows how to write spencerian allegory, but it actually shows the kind of perverse creative powers of Satan as a kind of author and his perverse sexuality and so on, and his auto eroticism. So Milton could write like Spencer when he wanted to, but ultimately, he did not want to write a kind of allegorical national poem. That's very clear. And then also, the romantic epic or romance epic tended to be digress. And in the invocation of book nine, he actually refers, in a sense, the romance epic, and some of its details, clearly with some attraction, but he also observes that it is long and tedious. I understand very well, that readers and scholars and romance epic are not going to like that, you know, our readers are expensive. But that's what he's referring to that my poem is not as aggressive, it's passages. So it's great passages like the invocations are very dense and very focused. And so ultimately, Milton moved in, in quite a different direction, writing Paradise Lost. That isn't to say that there aren't elements of romance in even in Paradise Lost Adam, for example, when he falls, is chivalric. You won't be can't imagine a life without Eve. And she praises him for his trial kind of trial of love. You know, even though Adam is not deceived, as eat, you know, he's not tempted by the serpent directly. So you can incorporate elements of chivalry as it were even romance into, into his writing. But overall, he clearly turns away from from romantic epic.

So what is the afterlife and legacy of Paradise Lost?

Well, the afterlife and legacy of Paradise Lost is incredibly rich. And so I can only really talk about a few examples, I think of the legacy in paradise loss, of course, was a poem that was so widely read, and not only in England, but also of course, in America and also in Europe. Within the time of Mills life, John Dryden, who admired Milton came to visit Milton. And Milton gave him permission to tag his verses, that is to actually write a kind of operatic poem which Dryden did, the state of innocence of the fall of man, in 1674, which is in rhyme, but it's a poem or kind of dramatic opera, which also does away with a crucial elements of Paradise Lost, including the war in heaven, or Satan's defiance against God basically focuses much more on the domestic drama between Adam and Eve. And I should say that one of the original things about Paradise Lost is the way that it focuses on the domestic life of Adam and Eve. And does so with enormous complexity and nuance, including their intimate life, their love life, and so on. In drying, this really becomes almost a kind of domestic restoration, drama with restoration, idioms, spoken idioms, and so on. But Dryden is picking up on something important in Paradise Lost, he's picking on the sort of domestic life of Adam and Eve or another way of putting it what he's picking up on is the way that Milton makes the epic domestic. Now, there are really so many examples of writers who draw upon Paradise Lost Creek and in creative ways, you know, it's hard to read. I mean, Keats draws upon Milton extensively his Ode to a nightingale. I mean, it owes a great deal to American Paradise Lost because in Paradise Lost the nightingale is associated with Eve. Eve is a love poet and she actually refers to the nightingale. The nightingale is is closely associated with the Bower of Adam and Eve. They're in their place of intimacy, where they make love and so on. And it also appears in the one of the invocations where Milton is actually in a sense, the nightingale is associated with Milton's own creativity, in a sense, his own poetic creativity and, and powers. So, there are many ways in which Keats clearly owes a great deal to Paradise Lost Wordsworth Prelude basically begins where paradise loss leaves off, but it's ultimately a poem about the growth of the poet's mind and is an epic of the self. And it's obviously an epic that focuses very much on the natural world. And so that that Wordsworth is the kind of poet prophet of nature, but clearly owes a great deal to to Milton Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, of course extraordinary piece of writing by the young Mary Shelley draws extensively upon Paradise Lost and a couple of different senses the monster and Mary Shelley's clearly identifies himself with with Milton's Satan. He obviously feels himself you know, tormented Satan. Satan has a kind of tragic dimension, so does the monster himself. The monster also yearns for a companion. In this sense, he's rather like Adam, who needs needs a companion, although there are obviously big differences, but this kind of intense yearning for another which Milton depicts in such moving and powerful ways in Paradise Lost you know, as soon as Adam is born and book eight of Paradise Lost, he expresses his desire for help me for another four and and God grants him that you know, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, also allies, the Frankenstein himself the scientists Frankenstein, with kind of satanic crit creation. And at the very end of Frankenstein, scientists Frankenstein himself says, all my speculations and hopes are as nothing and like the angel, Ark angel who aspired to Omnipotence ie Satan, I am chained to an intern, eternal hell. In other words, you know, it raises questions about what kind of creator the scientists Frankenstein is the romantic Creator, who has not taken responsibility for his creation,
who has not justified his ways or his losses about justifying the ways of God. Among other things. Frankenstein is a good example of a kind of rewriting of paradise loss. I might also add that obviously the monster in Frankenstein pursues a revenge very much like like Milton's Satan. So there are different aspects of Paradise Lost that feed into Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or to give you a modern example, Philip Pullman's trilogy, Dark Materials, clearly is based on Paradise loss. In fact, the phrase Dark Materials actually appears in Book Two of Paradise Lost, its associated with the dark materials that God uses to create more worlds that God actually creates from the kind of atoms clashing atoms of chaos that are described to. And so, Philip Pullman clearly draws upon Milton, he also draws upon Blake too, because Pullman is very sort of hostile to the church. But then, of course, as we discussed earlier, Milton is also very critical of the church, the institutional church, but Blake was also intensely critical of the church. And, you know, Blake himself was deeply influenced by Milton, even though to some extent, you know, he might have struggled with Milton's politics and radicalism or wanted to be more radical in some ways. But you know, he famously said in the marriage of heaven and hell that no one was of the devil's party without knowing it, this is the greatest parts of Paradise Lost are the sections in hell. That is where Milton's imagination is most intense, and that Milton in some sense, you know, subconsciously identified with with Satan. And so and as you, as you know, and many of your viewers may know, of the Romantics often not always often tended to see Satan as the hero of the poem who is the hero of a poem Byron is why it is Satan, not all romantics saw Satan that way, Coleridge compared Satan to Napoleon, for example, Paradise Lost is a kind of infinite source for authorial creativity afterwards. And, in the case of America, you could cite numerous examples we possess. Melville's annotations on Milton, including Paradise Lost there had been in the library at Princeton. So Melville himself drew upon Milton, including in a great great novel like Moby Dick. He also drew upon Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Brown and the Bible, obviously, but so Milton has a profound influence on authors no Simply English and American months later on.

What an enlightening conversation. And thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today.

My pleasure.