DEPARTMENT OF

ENGLISH

PAPER I –

English Literature (14th – 17th century)

Presented by:

Akanksha Chaturvedi

M.A. 1st year

Roll No. -
 JOHN MILTON

PARDISE LOST (BOOK 1)

The English Renaissance:

An introduction to the cultural revival that inspired an era of poetic evolution.

The English Renaissance, an era of cultural revival and poetic evolution started in the late
15th century and carried on into the revolutionary years of the 17th century. It stands as an
early summit of poetry achievement, the era in which the modern sense of English poetry
began. The era’s influence—its enduring traditions, inspiring experiments, and seemingly
unsurpassable highs—even reverberate today.

A period lasting only a century or two but encompassing momentous change, the English
Renaissance drastically shaped what being English meant, at home and abroad. As literacy
increased and printing accelerated, the English language rose to a place of international
prestige, and a distinctly English literature began to be braided from diverse cultural strands.

A Brief Summary:

John Milton (1608–1674) was a poet active in the Republican and Reformation
pamphleteering that led into the English Civil Wars and the mid-17th-century Commonwealth
government. He became completely blind by 1652 but continued to serve the Cromwell
government as Latin Secretary, an office that made him his government’s chief propagandist
to the European intellectual community. Although the age in which Milton was born and
wrote his poem is known as the Puritan age but the genius of Milton was so individualistic,
and he dominated the age in such a way that it is difficult to read his work as a product of that
age. Though he identified with Puritanism, he cannot be said to be dedicated to it completely.
His political and religious views were highly controversial in his own time, even more after
the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy (1660), but for nearly three hundred years after his
death they were mostly deemphasized as his countrymen sought to celebrate the brilliance of
his poetry, especially his epic Paradise Lost (original version:1667, revised: 1674). He is
usually situated among the three greatest writers of middle and early modern English (along
with Chaucer and Shakespeare), and despite some periods in which some or all of his work
faced critical hostility, he has sustained the admiration of readers and writers into the present
time.
Role of Milton in 14th – 17th century Literature:

John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance, laid down in his work the
foundations for the emerging appeal of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had in his mind a
concept of the public role of the poet and this role according to him was an elevated one.
Milton, through his poetry works wanted to do something for his native tongue but he was
complicated by a respect for the conscience that asked him to pursue those things that it knew
were right. Milton had a strong desire to “contribute to the progress of real and substantial
liberty. One which is to be sought not from somewhere outside, but within.”

His early verse aligned him, poetically and politically, with the Spenserians that were mostly
religious and pastoral odes. At the same time, he was also well read in Latin and Modern
Italian literature and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with Virgil’s Aeneid.

During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic (1642–60), Milton saw his role as an
intellectual serving the state for a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to creating and
drafting pamphlets, first in the cause of church reform and then in defense of the fledgling
republic, and he became Latin secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic of
virtue failed to materialize, and the Cromwellian settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the
returning monarchy. Milton showed himself virtually the last defender of the republic with
his tract “The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660)”, a courageous
but desperate program for a permanent oligarchy i.e. a rule by the select few of the Puritan
elect, this was the only way he could suggest to prevent the return to royal slavery.

Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and
Samson Agonistes were not published until after the Restoration. But their roots were deep in
the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s and in the resultant transformations in politics
and society. With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an all-powerful divine
monarchy, Paradise Lost revisits the politics of the last generation; its all-too-human
protagonists, turned out of Eden into a more difficult world where they have to acquire new
and less-certain kinds of heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the familiar bearings
have been changed, the old public certainties now rendered more private, particular, and
provisional. For Milton and his contemporaries, 1660 was a watershed that necessitated a
complete rethinking of assumptions and a corresponding reassessment of the literary
language, traditions, and forms appropriate to the new age.
The Restoration period that entails the restoration of King Charles II in 1660 led many to a
painful revaluation of the political hopes and millenarian expectations that bred during two
decades of civil war and republican government. For others, it excited the desire to celebrate
kingship and even to turn the events of the new reign into signs of a divinely ordained
scheme of things. Violent political conflict may have ceased, but the division between
royalists and republicans still ran through literature of the period. The literature of that period
included contradictory writers and poets and Milton flourished well during this period as
well.

The term Restoration literature is often taken to mean the literature of those who belonged, or
aspired to belong, to the restored court culture of Charles II’s reign so that people could look
back on the Restoration as an age of excess and extravagance. Yet Puritans and republicans
had not disappeared. The greatest prose controversialist of the pre-1660 years was John
Milton who did not return to that mode but in his enforced retirement from the public scene,
devoted himself to his great poems of religious struggle and conviction, Paradise Lost (1667,
revised 1674) and Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (both 1671). Each, in its probing
of the intricate ways in which God’s design reveals itself in human history, can justly be read
as a humbled but resolute response to the failure of a revolution in which Milton himself had
placed great trust and hope.

John Milton – Different from the others:

Milton was the first to conceive, from the outset of his career, a work which combined the
perfection of ancient art and the moral fabric of the Bible. He had experienced with his heart
the conflict of the opposing forces—Paganism and Christianity, nature and religion—and he
composed the differences in his own way. The proportion in which the two elements are
present in his works varies with his years, but from the beginning his powerful will mingles
with them harmoniously. No other English poet was at once so profoundly religious and so
much an artist.

Paradise Lost:

John Milton most likely composed Paradise Lost between 1658 and 1663, which was a period
of great political turmoil and transition during which Milton not only strenuously resisted the
oncoming Restoration but also grieved its inevitable realization. As Milton was composing
Paradise Lost he realized the very less difference between temporal politics and eternal
principles, and that during these years the poet withdraws from politics into faith. ‘Paradise
Lost’ presents Milton's responses to the politics of that period which was deeply conflicted
and these tensions contribute to the poem's richness as a Restoration nonconformist text.

Paradise Lost is a poetic rewriting of the book of Genesis. It tells the story of the fall of Satan
and his compatriots, the creation of man, and, most significantly, of man’s act of disobedience
and its consequences: paradise was lost for us. It is a literary text that goes beyond the
traditional limitations of literary storytelling, because for the Christian reader and for the
predominant philosophy of Western thinking and culture it involved the original story, the
exploration of everything that man would subsequently be and do.

Two questions arise from this and these have attended interpretations of the poem since its
publication in 1667.

First, to what extent did Milton diverge from orthodox perceptions of Genesis?

Second, how did his own experiences, feelings, allegiances, prejudices and disappointments,
play some part in the writing of the poem and, in respect of this, in what ways does it reflect
the theological and political tensions of the seventeenth century?

Let us answer these questions:

Paradise Lost is experimental as an epic and unorthodox as a sacred poem. It eschews the
national, imperial, and dynastic themes of previous epics and instead offers a probing and
original retelling of the fall of humankind and its tragic consequences. Other dimensions of
Paradise Lost—for example, its representation of gender and sexual relations, its emphasis on
Adam and Eve's domestic life and tensions, its engagement in controversial theological
issues, and its depiction of a material cosmos—also highlight its striking originality as an
epic.

Paradise Lost is a theological and historical epic, dealing with human amid super-human
facts, its action beginning before the creation, and ending with the disposition of things for
eternity. Its central conceptions are the truths of Christianity, represented with splendor of
language, and in certain portions with wealth of poetic ornament.

Politics in Paradise Lost

There are two ways in which we can analyze the politics behind ‘Paradise Lost’. On the one
hand, we can examine the stylistic and argumentative similarities between sections of
Paradise Lost and Milton's more explicitly political writings. On the other hand, Paradise
Lost can be read as a political symbol, which is to say that events and characters in Paradise
Lost can be aligned with aspects of the political context of the poem's creation.

Satan's speeches provide the strongest example of a distinctively political voice appearing in
the poem. When he addresses the fallen angels, Milton draws on rhetorical techniques which
are well-established in his political prose.

Here, Satan uses a series of rhetorical questions in order to assert his point. But Milton's
rhetorical sophistication also allows him to weave subtle flaws into Satan's arguments,
expressing his corrupted nature at a particularly detailed level. When in Book IX Satan
persuades Eve to eat the fruit, Milton strikes a fascinating balance between making Satan
convincing and making sure that his arguments are misleading.

Satan deliberately misunderstands Eve in order to make God's restriction appear more
authoritarian and perverse. But more than this, he implies that there is a contradiction
between Adam and Eve having been created as lords over the world and their being restricted
from eating the sacred fruit. The implication is gentle, and avoids direct criticism of God,
instead putting pressure on Eve to justify God's prohibition.

These examples also demonstrate Satan's ability to modulate between different kinds of
rhetorical questioning, much as Milton's prose works combine both blistering interrogations,
and the pointed, fake attitude which Satan adopts towards Eve.

But the stylistic similarities between passages of Paradise Lost and Milton's political works
are not mere chance. They arise in part because the characters in Paradise Lost find
themselves in situations which genuinely are political. In directing the Son to create earth,
God the Father is conducting an act of rulership, which is inescapably political. Likewise,
Satan's attempts to rouse the fallen angels in Book I really are reminiscent of Milton's desire
to rally support for the Cromwellian government. These broader political parallels lead us
towards a more allegorical interpretation of the poem as a whole. We can begin to see how
the great debate in Book II might be read as a political satire, mocking the tiresome debates
which Milton conducted in his youth. Similarly, the interaction of Adam and Eve is a
fascinating study of gender politics, whilst the relationship between God the Father and God
the Son presents an obvious ideal of kingship and the delegation of power. But the danger of
such readings is that they quickly lose their specificity. The figure of Satan especially
accommodates a wide variety of different symbolic interpretations. He can be seen as a false
leader to the fallen angels, his enforcement of his own will on the great debate in Book II
recalling Charles I's willful disregard for parliament. But alternatively, he can be seen to
represent something of Milton and Cromwell in their revolutionary struggles against the king.
At a slightly more general level he can even be seen to represent the failure of any political
discourse in this period, and of religious culture which attempts to exist apart from divine
authority and biblical revelation. The problem is that Satan is primarily identified as a force
of rebellion against God, and Paradise Lost rarely seems to require us to consider him as
anything else.

Conclusion:

An understanding of the politics of Paradise Lost clearly depends on an understanding of the

politics of the English Civil War and particularly of Milton's position in it. The application of
this knowledge to the text of Paradise Lost is perhaps most effectively conducted through an
appreciation of the interplay of ideas between Milton's poetic and political writings. Symbolic
interpretations, although interesting and to some extent the natural result of a stylistic analysis
of the poem's politics, play an important role. Although Paradise Lost is very much a poem
of its times, it is important to remember that its setting is metaphysical and its direct concern
religious.