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Milton composed his early verse in Latin, in the fashion of a
classically educated person. As
soon as his third year at Cambridge, however, he expressed his
desire to abandon such
fashionable poetry in order to write in his native tongue.
Unlike the learned classicists of hisday, who imitated Greek and
Latin versification, Milton sought to rehabilitate the English
poetic tradition by establishing it as an extension or flowering
of the classical tradition. He
saw himself as a poet whose lineage extended, through the
Romans, back to the Greeks.Like Homer and Virgil before him, Milton
would be the epic poet of the English nation.
The poetic vocation to which Milton was heir is both
nationalistic and religious in character.
The epic poet chronicles the religious history of a people; he
plays the role of prophet-
historian. Hence, as Milton wrote in a letter to Charles
Diodati, "the bard is sacred to the
gods; he is their priest, and both his heart and lips
mysteriously breathe the indwellingJove." A sense of religiosity
and patriotism drive Milton's work. On the one hand, he felt thathe
could best serveGodby following his vocation as a poet. His poetry
would, on the other
hand, serve England by putting before it noble and religious
ideas in the highest poeticform. In other words, Milton sought to
write poetry which, if not directly or overtly didactic,would serve
to teach delightfully. The body of work emerging from these twin
impulses -
one religious, the other political -witnesses his development as
(or into) a Christian poet
and a national bard. Finally, it is inParadise Lostthat Milton
harmonizes his two voices as apoet and becomes the Christian
singer, as it were, of epic English poems.
It should be noted, then, that in Paradise Lost Milton was not
only justifying God's ways to
humans in general; he was justifying His ways to the English
people between 1640 and1660. That is, he was telling them why they
had failed to establish the good society by
deposing the king, and why they had welcomed back the monarchy.
LikeAdamandEve,they had failed through their own weaknesses, their
own lack of faith, their own passions
and greed,their own sin. God was not to blame for humanity's
expulsion from Eden, nor wasHe to blame for the trials and
corruption that befell England during the time of the
Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. The failure of the Puritan
revolution was
tantamount, for Milton, to the people's failure to govern
themselves according to the will ofGod, rather than of a royal
despot. England had had the opportunity to become an
instrument of God's plan, but ultimately failed to realize
itself as the New Israel. ParadiseLost was more than a work of art.
Indeed, it was a moral and political treatise, a poeticexplanation
for the course that English history had taken.
Milton began Paradise Lost in 1658 and finished in 1667. He
wrote very little of the poem in
his own hand, for he was blind throughout much of the project.
Instead, Milton would
dictate the poem to an amanuensis, who would read it back to him
so that he could make
necessary revisions. Milton's daughters later described their
father being like a cow readyfor milking, pacing about his room
until the amanuensis arrived to "unburden" him of theverse he had
stored in his mind.
Milton claimed to have dreamed much of Paradise Lost through the
nighttime agency of
angelic muses. Besides lending itself to mythologization, his
blindness accounts for at least
one troubling aspect of the poem: its occasional inconsistencies
of plot. Because he could
not read the poem back to himself, Milton had to rely on his
memory of previous events inthe narrative, which sometimes proved
faulty.
Putting its infrequent (and certainly minor) plot defects aside,
Paradise Lost is nothing short
of a poetic masterpiece. Along with Shakespeare's plays,
Milton's Paradise Lost is the mostinfluential poem in English
literature as well as being a basis for or prooftext of modern
poetic theory.
http://www.gradesaver.com/paradise-lost/study-guide/section2/
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