For the past few months, I have been studying John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This study included the following texts:

• Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Edition): this edition contains the poem itself, background sources, and critical essays
• C.S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost
• William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• Philip Pullman’s introduction to Paradise Lost
• Martin Henn’s introduction to Parmenides of Elea

I have long enjoyed reading epic poetry, but most of it is translated from another language into English (such as The Iliad and The Odyssey from Greek and parts of the Mahabharata [2] from Sanskrit). Paradise Lost, the first epic poem originally written in English I have read, provided me much insight into the nature of epic poetry — how the sounds and meter and words work together to accomplish particular effects.

C.S. Lewis also provides great insight into epic poetry in general in the first eight chapters of A Preface to Paradise Lost. (This or something like it should be required reading for all Classics students in universities.) He distinguishes between Primary Epic and Secondary Epic — the terms denoting chronology, not value.

1. Primary Epic, such as The Iliad and Beowulf, uses oral techniques and possesses a ceremonial, public tone. Primary Epic conjures up certain images about its recitation:
   

   A king, a great warrior, or a poet inspired by the Muse, seated and chanting to the harp a poem on high matters before an assembly of nobles a court (16).

   The subject of Primary Epic consists primarily of heroes and single stories:

   Primary Epic simply wants a heroic story [...] the mere endless up and down, the constant aimless alternations of glory and misery: [...] today we kill and feast, tomorrow we are killed, and our women are led away as slaves (29-30).

2. Secondary Epic, such as The Aeneid and Paradise Lost, aims at something much loftier and more solemn: a ‘great national design’.
   

   [In Virgil's Aeneid,] national, or almost cosmic, issues are involved. [...] We have just turned some great corner, and everything, for better or worse, will always henceforth be different. [...] These men are not fighting for their own hand like Homeric heroes; they are men with a vocation, men on whom a burden is laid (34-36).

   The expected audience for Secondary Epic is also quite different:

   Secondary Epic [...] has lost all the external aids to solemnity which the Primary enjoyed. There is no robed and garlanded [singer], no altar, not even a feast in a hall — only a private person reading a book in an armchair (40).

Philip Pullman tells how he read Paradise Lost in high school with a teacher that emphasized the sound of the poetry, even working with the students to read the text aloud. (This differed from my own high school experience, where I presume the teacher must not have understood the meter of Shakespeare because she told us just to read it aloud like prose.) Pullman says you must read the poem out loud, even if only in a whisper. I actually read much of the poem on airplanes and a whisper was all I could manage — but that was enough. I fell in love with the meter, and it became second nature to me. I couldn’t help thinking in the meter, composing lines like the following to myself as I walked through the airport:

• I better get some breakfast ’ere I board.
• In which direction is the baggage claim?

When Martin Henn translated the poem of Parmenides (originally written in Greek in the meter of Homer) into English, he chose to use the iambic pentameter of Milton.

If one wishes to follow one’s predecessors’ style, the way Parmenides followed Homer, then one should adopt the traditional pattern used by the English poets to translate epic and didactic poetry from the Greek (18).

After finishing Paradise Lost, it seemed appropriate for me to re-write the one epic poem I have written (just forty lines for my Epics of Ancient India class) into this same meter. I’m still at work on the revision, which begins with these lines:

The Demons with their fortresses on high
Looked down from there with jealously and rage
Conspiring how to inflict their wrath on men
Locked up the heavens, brought drought upon the land.

(UPDATE: I have now completed the revision, with slight modification to these opening lines.)

One of the most interesting aspects of scholarship on Paradise Lost is the role of Milton’s Satan. Philip Pullman tells the story he heard about an “ageing contry squire two hundred years ago”:

[He was] sitting by his fireside listening to Paradise Lost being read aloud. [...] He doesn’t know the story at all; but as he sits there, perhaps with a pint of port at his side and with a gouty foot propped up on a stool, he finds himself transfixed. Suddenly he bangs the arm of his chair, and exclaims, ‘By God! I know not what the outcome may be, but this Lucifer’s a damn fine fellow, and I hope he may win!’

Many people have this same reaction; Pullman, for example, adds to the squire’s comments, “[These] are my sentiments exactly.” William Blake commented, “Milton [...] was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” (Plate 6). Nineteenth-century scholarship on Paradise Lost predominantly portrayed Satan in positive light: “[Satan's] situation as the fearless antagonism of Omnipotence makes him either a fool or a hero, and Milton is far indeed from permitting us to think him a fool” (“Norton” 407). Satan was seen then as a heroic character attempting to resist oppression. Philip Pullman’s beautiful His Dark Materials trilogy contains a similar idea: the characters work to overthrow the tyranny of the “Kingdom of Heaven” in order to set up a new “Republic of Heaven”.

As powerful, exciting, and inspiring as these sentiments might be, I do not think they can be attributed to Milton. Lewis describes two different meanings of the common statement that Milton’s Satan is a magnificent character:

It may mean that Milton’s presentation of him is a magnificent poetical achievement which engages the attention and excites the admiration of the reader.

On the other hand, it may mean that the real being (if any) whom Milton is depicting [...] is or ought to be an object of admiration and sympathy, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the poet or reader (94).

Lewis goes on to say that this second sense seems to him erroneous. Satan is a creature suffering from injured pride and, after losing the war in heaven and realizing he is powerless to harm God, tempts Adam and Eve away from God — “ruining two creatures who had never done him any harm, no longer in the serious hope of victory, [...] only to annoy the Enemy” (99).