Critics on Milton

Milton and the Place of  English

Milton is the awkward member of the pantheon of the three great English writers [the others being Chaucer and Shakespeare]. He gained his status for a number of reasons but principally for achieving what he set out to do to – to write of  ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rime’.

To understand the importance of Milton we have to understand how he established English as a language capable of matching other languages’ ability to handle the most complex of human perceptions and experiences through the medium of the epic – the highest form of poetry.  Historically, English was not a major European language. Amongst the learned, Latin, of course, was supreme but it was no longer used creatively. The mediaeval and early renaissance periods had seen a flowering of vernacular literatures across Europe – an expression of a diversity of regional or national cultures: in England, Chaucer bore the prize, establishing the dialect of the East Midlands spoken in London as the principal dialect of English laying the foundations of what would become modern Standard English. Although there was cultural cross-fertilisation in Europe, it tended to be, so far as English was concerned, a case of borrowing rather than lending. Hence Chaucer used various French sources in his writing, but it was Italy that was regarded as the cultural centre of Europe.  Chaucer owed much more to the writings of the Italian Boccaccio whose Decameron provided the source of three tales – the Clerk’s, the Franklin’s and the Shipman’s – as well as the general structure of the series of tales told by a variety of tellers. Chaucer then, like Milton after him, was culturally cosmopolitan, reading his contemporaries in Europe as well as having a classical education and a deep understanding of the writings of ancient philosophers and poets.

Italian, too, had produced three major epics. Two were based on knightly exploits: Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso [1516] is a rather ironic romance in episodes following the wanderings and trials of its hero, Orlando; Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata [1581] is a more solemn account of the crusades to the Holy Land. The most influential epic, however, was Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy [1314], an account of the author’s dream-journey through heaven, hell and purgatory. It is interesting to note that Milton’s original project – The Arthuriad – was to have matched the knightly quest convention of Ariosto; but that he abandoned it for the supreme task of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’ – closer in intention to that of Dante. A language that could manage that had surely come of age. So, for the English, Milton became a matter of national pride – the author who gave the language international status.  

1 Did Milton write in English?

But it was a status that was not unproblematic. Whereas it is comparatively easy to see how, linguistically, there is a continuum in the English of Chaucer and Shakespeare and the language we now speak, that is less obviously so in the case of Milton. The principal criticism can be parodied by the statement that ‘Milton does not write English’.

T.S. Eliot [Milton I 1936]

.… the serious charges to be made against him [are] the peculiar deterioration to which he subjected the language.

Milton writes English like a dead language. The criticism has been made with regard to his involved syntax. But a tortuous style, when its peculiarity is aimed at precision, is not necessarily a dead one; only when the complication is dictated by a demand of verbal music, instead of any demand of sense.

To extract everything possible from Paradise Lost, it would seem necessary to read it in two different ways, first solely fir the sound, and second for the sense. The full beauty of his long periods [i.e. sentences] can hardly be enjoyed while we are wrestling with the meaning as well….

T.S. Eliot [Milton II, 1947]

In this article, Eliot has revised his position. Whereas in 1936 he had seen Milton’s language as a dangerous path – a deviation from the nature of English, by 1947 he sees Milton as a necessary conservative, preventing too rapid change in language and in its poetic uses.

Modern poetry will have much to learn from Milton’s extended verse structure; it might also avoid the danger of a servitude to colloquial speech and to current jargon. It might also learn that the music of verse is strongest in poetry which has a definite meaning expressed in the properest words. Poets might be led to admit that acknowledged of the literature of their own language, with a knowledge of the literature and the grammatical construction of other languages, is a very valuable part of the poet’s equipment. And they might … devote some study of  Milton as … the greatest master in our language of freedom within form… In studying Paradise Lost we come to perceive that the verse is continuously animated by the departure from, and return to, the regular measure [i.e. rhythm].

F.R. Leavis [‘Milton’s Verse’, in Revaluation, 1936]

The great Cambridge critic, F.R. Leavis, shared Eliot’s earlier view of the unnaturalness of Milton’s English.

Even in the first two books of Paradise Lost, where the myth [of the fall of Satan] has vigorous life and one can admire the magnificent invention that Milton’s verse is, we feel, after a few hundred lines, our sense of dissatisfaction growing into something stronger. … We find ourselves protesting against the routine gesture, the heavy fall, of the verse, flinching from the foreseen thud that comes so inevitably, and, at last, irresistibly: from reading Paradise Lost is a matter of resisting, of standing up against, the verse-movement, of subduing it to something tolerably like sensitiveness, and in the end out resistance is worn down; we surrender at last to the inescapable monotony of the ritual.

Donald Davie Syntax and Music in Paradise Lost

Davie argues that one of the strongest [‘muscular’ is the word he uses] effects Milton deploys is a kinetic one – one that creates a sense of movement. He uses I.44-49 ‘Him the Almighty … Onmipotent to Arms’ and II.939-50 ‘Quenched in a bog … or creeps, or flies’ as evidence. He is arguing that the poetry enacts the state it is describing. He also, implicitly, assumes that we are reading the poem aloud to hear the music.

Of the first extract he comments: We occupy in ourselves the gestalt  [roughly ‘total experience greater than the sum of its parts’] of the falling.

Of the second he comments: Milton crowds stressed syllables together so as to make the vocal exertion in reading imagine the physical exertion described. It is the reader, too, who flounders, stumbles, pushes doggedly on. Just as skilful, though less conspicuous, is the way un which line-break, punctuation and metre  combine to make ‘Half flying’ act out, in our speaking of the words, the abbreviated and ungainly flap which they describe.

Although ‘dramatic’ is an inadequate word, it is still the right word for these felicities, because what they do is to force us to participate in the situation and the actions described; we no longer merely observe these, in imagination we suffer them, ourselves embroiled.

Davie offers criticism of the way in which Milton breaks the narrative flow of the plot by looking to the future. He cites examples of Satan’s confrontation with Death [II 720-722] and when he launches into Chaos [II 1021-1028]. He also criticises Milton’s practice of introducing digression into ‘arcane knowledge’ – such as the account of Galileo’s telescope: Davie comments:

… because the overt structure of Paradise Lost is narrative, and because of the speculative learning encrusted upon its every angle, this consistent disruption of the present time inevitably distracts the reader’s attention from the poem as narrative to the poem as encyclopaedia.

If one of the major critical interests of Milton is his use of English, another is that of his allegiance.

William Blake [1757-1827] famously wrote:

The reason Milton wrote in fetters [= chains i.e. Milton was inhibited] when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

Interestingly, Blake’s evidence lies in the vitality of language. He sees Milton creatively engaged when dealing with Satan and evil in a way he claims is lacking when he deals with God.

This comment would have surprised – scandalised – Milton who, though heterodox in his views on Christianity, was a believer. He accepted the omnipotence and omniscience of God and the belief in free will as the foundation of the interaction between God and humankind – though he did not accept the doctrines of the Trinity or of predestination.

William Empson [1906-1984]

Empson was a mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1920s who, while pursuing his avowed subject, wrote a book on the nature of English poetry – Seven Types of Ambiguity – shortly before being sent down from university after a condom was found in his rooms. He subsequently published Milton’s God – the most stimulating study of Paradise Lost. His argument was that, in dealing with Satan, Milton had to give him an intellectual consistency and integrity. This is not necessarily the same as saying that Milton was on Satan’s side. In other words, as is true in all literature, a distinction should be maintained between author and character. One example Empson uses is the description of God as ‘Almighty’ using Satan’s third grand speech in Book I.242-270.

Satan calls God ‘Almighty’ … but Milton expects the reader to impute a tone of irony, because Satan is retorting upon God a familiar accusation against himself [i.e. a word used by God to quell Satan]; he may also mean to express doubt whether God created Hell, but in any case he sneers at the metaphysical meaning of ‘Almighty’ while accepting the common one*:

                                                th’ Almighty hath not built

                        Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: [260]

I am not denying, what Milton regularly asserts, that Satan fell out of pride and envy; but as Satan believes God to be a usurper he genuinely does believe him to be envious. As soon as we waive out metaphysical presumptions [i.e. when we work outside the terms given by orthodox Christian belief] we easily recognise that the motivation will be complex as in human affairs. In another case, resisting Charles I for example, the emotional forces actuating Satan could have made him work for the public good with increasingly public-spirited sentiments. As has often been pointed out, he is in the wrong solely because of an intellectual error [i.e. he mistook the true nature of God. In other words He was really ‘Almighty’ and not simply ironically so]; and we are ill-equipped to dell certain that we ourselves, in his place, would have decided rightly from the right motives.

*[note: Earlier in the argument, Empson had seen Beelzebub’s use of the word ‘Almighty’ to mean simply ‘stronger than us’ because God had defeated them and therefore, militarily rather than metaphysically He was ‘almighty’.]

3 Kingship and Rebellion

A third area that has engaged critics and historians is Milton’s politics and his adherence to the Republican party against the Royalist. That he held the position of Latin Secretary to Cromwell made him, in modern terms, a high-ranking civil servant, but one whose politics were largely in line with those of the Commonwealth Government. His imprisonment after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the threat of a traitor’s death indicate his standing.

Christopher Hill

The pre-eminent historian of the Commonwealth period of English history is Christopher Hill. In his ‘Paradise Lost’ and the English Revolution he sought to tease out the seeming political contradictions within the poem, principally the significance of Satan’s rebellion against God and how it might reflect the politics to which Milton  had devoted his life – and which in 1660 threatened to take his life.

Satan, Hill argues, cannot be simply identified with Charles I. Hill argues that the qualities of pride and ambition are principally human weaknesses. Satan, therefore, reflects humankind misled. He identifies Satan with those plotting to restore Charles II; but he also sees characteristics of the self-seeking republicans whom he observed at close quarters – the major-generals.

Hill argues that Milton did not oppose revolt against authority in itself, but that the defeat of The Good Old Cause of republicanism made him reflect on what form resistance should take.

So far as God is concerned, there could be no equivalence in Satan’s revolt against Him and the Republicans’ revolt against Charles I or the plottings of the Royalists seeking the return of Charles II. Hill warns us against trying to make a simple correlation between the events of the Commonwealth and the events in Paradise Lost. Keep this in mind as you read Hill’s argument.

Milton and the English Revolution, (1977) pp. 365-75

The political allusions in Paradise Lost, veiled though they had to be, are not indecipherable. The poem was no doubt planned as a whole before the Restoration of May 1660. Nevertheless there must have been a break in 1660, when Milton was in danger of his life and had to go into hiding; and a further interruption when he was in prison. It would have been dangerous for friends to visit his hiding-place for the sole purpose of taking down from his dictation, and impossible when he was imprisoned. The invocation to Book VII suggests a fresh start, under more difficult circumstances; the conjecture that Books I to VI were written (at least in first draft) before the Restoration, Books VII to XII after it, appears to be borne out by the evidence of style, which links the last six books with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes more closely than with the first six books. But 'I sing ... unchanged' (VII. 24) may also be intended to recall to the fitter audience for whom Paradise Lost was written the John Milton whom they knew as the defender of divorce, regicide and the republic.

There is a shift of emphasis in the last six books of the epic. Until April 1660 the revolutionaries still held power, however insecurely. The Royalists had been defeated, although they were desperately scheming revenge. In Books I and II Satan is wrong but grandly wrong. His attempt 'against the omnipotent to rise in arms' (VI. 136) seemed as absurd as a Royalist attempt to reverse the verdict of history! But after May 1660 Satan was not trying vainly to recover power in England: he had won it. His degradation in the second half of the epic is the greater because of Milton's disgusted realisation of the power and influence of evil. It is paralleled by the stepping forward of the Creator-Son and the withdrawal of the impersonal Father. We should not then see Satan just as the apotheosis of rebellion. One subject of Paradise Lost is indeed rebellion, but Milton had himself been a rebel; he wanted now to know where he and his fellows had been mistaken, what kind of rebellion was justified and what not.

Satan, no less than Christ, is a king. His approach to Eve is a parody of the rituals of courtly love at Henrietta Maria [wife of Charles I]’s court. Satan was 'by merit raised' to kingship in hell, as the Son had been in heaven. The analogy with the Son is stressed throughout. Sin, Death and Satan are the infernal Trinity: I see no reason why Milton should not parody this concept, in which he himself did not believe. In the early books Satan's 'grandeur' and 'ruined splendour' predominate. But Satan is also an Asiatic tyrant, associated with Turkish despotism (X. 457) - as Charles I had been in Eikonoklastes. Since 1649 another group of men had been called Turkish bashaws - Cromwell's Major-Generals. It is not unlikely that there is something of them in the fallen angels. The latter are not mere personifications of evil. They were angels of light who have rejected the light. As Northrop Frye says, 'into Satan Milton has put all the horror and distress with which he contemplated the egocentric revolutionaries of his time', whose romantic rhetoric had got them – and those who trusted them – nowhere.

If, among other things, the character of Satan alludes to some of the ways in which the Good Old Cause [i.e. The Republic] had gone wrong, it is to be expected that he will contain a good deal of Milton, who recognised that he too was not without responsibility for its failure. Milton's intellect now told him that he must accept God's will, if only because the Father is omnipotent: but his Submission to the events of 1655-60 [a period in which Milton grew disillusioned with Cromwell’s move towards kingly pretensions] was highly reluctant. Satan, the battleground for Milton's quarrel with himself, saw God as arbitrary power and nothing else. Against this he revolted: the Christian, Milton knew, must accept it. Yet how could a free and rational individual accept what God had done to his servants in England? On this reading, Milton expressed through Satan (of whom he disapproved) the dissatisfaction which he felt with the Father (whom intellectually he accepted).

Milton does not identify with Satan and the rebel angels, who embody and criticise the defects of the military leaders of the Revolution, as well as –  more obviously – of the Royalists. The essence of Satan is his selfish ambition. Jealousy of the exaltation of the Son caused his rebellion. As Defoe observed, Milton gave no real explanation of Satan's fall; it is taken as given from the start of the poem. The exaltation of the Son is one of Milton's inventions, and it appears to be a late insertion in the epic: it is not in the Bible, the commentaries or –  still more significant –  in the De Doctrina [Milton’s declaration of his religious beliefs]. Milton seems to have invented it in order to have an unexplained divine decree leading to the fall of the angels analogous to that which led to the Fall of Man, so as to reinforce the parallel between earth and heaven. Angels, like men, elect their own salvation. This is Arminian doctrine. Milton endowed Satan with conscience (IV. 23) and appears to envisage the possibility of his repenting (IV. 71-104). This too must be intended to stress the analogies between him and mankind.

Satan has freedom without self-discipline, dynamic energy and driving individualism with no recognition of limits. 'Satan has more to say about liberty than any other character in Paradise Lost. Milton had heard the name of liberty bandied about a good deal by either side during the civil war.' Satan's kind of liberty, like the Ranters' kind, became licence - and so ceased to be truly free. Satan also has much to say about equality (Paradise Lost, I. 248-9).

This approach enables us to admit a great deal of Milton in Satan without reviving the view of Blake, Shelley, Belinsky – all romantic radicals, we note –  that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost, or that he is the first Whig. Satan is heroic: as heroic as Milton still thinks the English Revolution had been. But the Revolution had utterly failed. It had failed because the men were not great enough for the Cause. Satan had always been a rebel for the wrong reasons - self interest, jealousy, ambition. Like Muggleton's Satan, Milton's personified selfish Reason. As early as 1641 Milton had been arguing that the selfishness and greed which were mixed up with the motives of the original reformers did not destroy the value of the Protestant Reformation. Now perhaps he saw deeper. We must, however, not take Milton's condemnation of Satan as condemnation of rebellion, any more than we should take his acceptance of a hierarchy of being from man up to God as acceptance of a traditional social hierarchy of 'degree'. Milton's is a hierarchy of virtue, of merit. In Paradise Lost Adam increases in virtue as Satan decreases; in Paradise Regained Christ grows in merit. Only God's virtue is by definition absolute: that is why he must be obeyed.

Nevertheless the magnificent Satan of the early books of the epic does convey some of the defiance which Milton himself must have felt tempted to hurl in the face of omnipotence as the republic crashed about his ears. The rebellious energy ebbs in the later books, after the restoration of Charles II has brought Milton to recognise the full magnitude of the rethinking that is required. Perhaps Milton felt that he and his peers had been too tolerant of the Satanic fellow travellers of the Revolution. God, after all, is not only King of the English Commonwealth, he is also the historical process: what he wills is fate. So Satan is a rebel against history itself, not someone Milton can identify with. In the De Doctrina Milton began his list of the sins involved in the Fall of Man with credulity in Satan and lack of confidence in God; it ends with deceit, aspiration to divinity, pride and arrogance. Presumptuous aspiration, use of the wrong means, pride and arrogance: they are the vices against which Milton and other radicals had warned Oliver Cromwell and his generals. Deceit: like Dalila quoting,

                   that grounded maxim

So rife and celebrated in the mouths

Of wisest men, that to the public good

Private respects must yield;

         (Samson Agonistes, 11. 865-8)

or like Cromwell pleading 'public reason just, / Honour and empire', to justify an aggressive foreign policy. (Milton underlined the point for contemporaries by referring to Satan's use of 'necessity, / The tyrant's plea' in the following lines. The phrase recalled accusations that Cromwell made necessities in order to plead them e.g. by Joseph Beaumont in Psyche (1648), and by George Cony, an old Parliamentarian stalwart, when refusing to pay taxes to Cromwell: Cony himself was echoing Hampden's lawyer in the Ship Money Case [one of the causes of the rebellion against Charles I – the imposition of arbitrary taxation], and Hampden was Cromwell's cousin. In Book V Satan plans to recover power 'by violence, no, for that shall be withstood, / But by deceit and lies' (V. 242-4).

The Satanic Parliament gave Milton the chance to stress what was most lacking in 1658-60 - unity among the defenders of the Good Old Cause:

O shame to men! Devil with devil damned

Firm concord holds, men only disagree

Of creatures rational, though under hope

Of heavenly grace: and God proclaiming peace

Yet live in hatred, enmity and strife

Among themselves, and levy cruel wars,

Wasting the earth, each other to destroy:

As if (which might induce us to accord)

Man had not hellish foes enough besides

That day and night for his destruction wait.

                                                                           (II.496-505)

[Even at the heart of democracy – Parliament – Hill detects a disillusionment with the way it operated during the Commonwealth, though not with the institution itself.

Hill, later in his book, makes the case for the unrecognised success of the Commonwealth period. The Restoration may have returned the monarchy, but it was a very different institution to the pre-Commonwealth one. Charles I had tried to assert an absolutist position – ruling by decree and without Parliament. Charles II, having learned from his father’s fate was happier as a bourgeois monarch, a position that was consolidated after the expulsion of his own son James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which brought Mary and William to the throne as joint monarchs.]

Note: Hill deals with the historical context. Remember, however, that Paradise Lost is not a political manifesto. It is a piece of literature speaking about universal concerns. 

Claire Tomalin

'a man possessed by natural and human beauty, by dreams, myths and legends, a man full of ideas that are sometimes in conflict with one another; who was prepared to give up his vocation as a poet for years in order to serve a political cause; and who overcame blindness to write his greatest work, full of exquisitely imagined scenes'

Milton makes you think, provokes you into arguments about power, good and evil, about responsibility, innocence and the right to knowledge. He shows God forbidding this right, but we remember that Milton had himself defended it furiously in his essay on the freedom of the press, "Areopagitica". The clash between Milton the Renaissance humanist and Milton the faithful servant of God makes things interesting.

One of Milton's characteristic effects is to collide Christian and pagan imagery and legend. Eve is compared to a wood-nymph in Diana's service. Raphael arrives in the garden of Eden like the god Mercury, shaking his plumes and giving out "Heavenly fragrance".

Dr Johnson felt there was 'gigantick loftiness' about his poetry

Joseph Hazlitt felt that Milton's imagination could melt down "as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials"

Randeep Ramesh

Milton's Satan was loosely modelled on Oliver Cromwell, a compromised figure who had led a de facto benevolent dictatorship where discussion and argument substituted for true freedoms in a political democracy. Milton had been left bitter after Cromwell failed to empower people and deliver the country from the tyranny of the king. Today Britain has to decide not whether it wants to get rid of a divine monarchy but whether it wishes to overthrow a divine market.

Like Satan, whose fallen angels ultimately lose to God, the Restoration triumphed over Cromwell's puritan party. In many ways Paradise Lost is a literary rendition of today's political argument for the status quo: There Is No Alternative. Now the question is not whether the country would choose enslavement to the throne but whether it remains bonded to an almost biblical belief in the benefits of deregulated markets. This market theology not only caused the Great Crash of 2008, it has also spread both greater inequalities and a higher degree of economic insecurity in our lives for decades.

The fall of humankind through the temptation of Eve is paralleled by an economically ravaged people being seduced and falling again for free-market policies that will leave them leading poorer and more precarious lives.

J. B. Broadbent: a comfortably pessimistic survey of world history

Jonathan Richardson (1734): "'Tis Adam, Adam the first, the representative of human race. He is the hero in this poem.... The business of it is to conduct man through a variety of conditions of happiness and distress, all terminating in the utmost good: from a state of precarious innocence through temptation, sin, repentance, and finally a secure recumbency upon . .. the Supreme Good by the mediation of his Son."

Merritt Y. Hughes Milton's Adam surrendered to Divine Justice, Mercy, and Love. Seen in the light of history as equivalent to attainment of an ideal resembling Platonic or Aristotelian temperance, to which all violence and excess are opposite, or as equivalent to modern man's intellectually disciplined submission to the phvsical and social principles of life, the attainment of the mood of the last dialogues and the prayers of Adam and Eve in Book X seemed to Tillyard to be no less a crisis-a turning point in the medical sense of the word-than their Fall in Book IX

Heroic virtue is a divine attribute which can be shared by men and even by angels only as long as they are true images of God himself. By this severe logic, Adam ceases to be heroic when he loses the divine image after the Fall. What was intended is an ever-refining idea of heroism.
It is a part of Milton's own "long choosing" of his "Subject for Heroic Song," to settle at last upon the "fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom / Unsung" rather than the dissection of "fabl'd Knights / In Battels feign'd"-"hitherto the onely Argument / Heroic deem'd" (IX.26-32). His literary experience complements Adam's discovery that "renown on Earth" is poor material for history. The upshot might seem to be Saurat's view of Milton as his own ironically unconscious hero.

Tillyard suggested that Eve wanted Adam to coax, her, say how much he loved her then put his foot down, Eve being coquettish

Fredson Bowers sees Adam as the embodiment of reason whilst Eve is the embodiment of passion

Joan S Bennett

• Liberty as the goal of contemporary revolutionaries
• For Milton, no law was to be obeyed because it was a law eg breaking sabbath to heal the sick
• Dilemma or knowing what is holy spirit and what is own desire