Alan Jacobs. Paradise Lost: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2025. $24.95. 224 pp.
In 1667, the poet John Milton published Paradise Lost, an epic poem about the fall of man. Milton’s dogmatic emphases in this poem “helped make him one of the most despised writers in history, and Paradise Lost one of the most despised poems, though also one of the most admired,” reflects Alan Jacobs in his new volume, part of the Princeton University Press series, Lives of Great Religious Books. Jacobs makes it his task to understand these radically opposing reactions.
Jacobs was a good choice to write this volume. He is, first, a careful and experienced reader of the poem, which he has taught many times. But second, he is not a Milton specialist. This is an advantage for this project since he writes as a generalist and for a general literate audience. Finally, as he explains, his feelings for Milton and the poem are mixed; the benefit is that this “biography,” though it appreciates the excellences of Paradise Lost, never declines into hagiography.
Jacobs begins, properly, by questioning whether Paradise Lost ought to be regarded as a great religious book. Distinguishing between a “functional definition of religion” and a “dogmatic definition,” he acknowledges (along with C. S. Lewis) that Paradise Lost is not functional, not devotionally enriching in the way that, for example, George Herbert’s poetry has been for many readers. Milton’s poem fits, rather, under the dogmatic definition of religion, since “in it Milton is passionately concerned to identify certain central beliefs of the Christian faith.”
Readers’ perceptions of Milton the man have frequently influenced their reception of Paradise Lost (and vice versa), a fact that justifies Jacobs’s survey of Milton’s life in his first chapter. Milton knew that he wanted to write an epic early in his career as a poet. Why was this poetic ambition delayed? Jacobs surveys the circumstances of Milton’s early life in London and then Cambridge, explaining that “his concerns were not economic, or even, at first, strictly political. He was a learned man, one inclined first to the service of poetry and second to the service of the church.” Although his family expected that he eventually would take orders in the Church of England, by the time he had completed the necessary training, he found himself conscience-bound to resist Archbishop William Laud’s emphases on liturgical ceremonialism and clerical hierarchy. He felt compelled, in political as well as ecclesial respects, to “the defense of liberty.”
In his second chapter Jacobs provides an overview of the poem, but only after dealing with two preliminary considerations. The first few pages of the chapter sketch the significance of documents collected in the Trinity manuscript. These include drafts of poems and Milton’s ideas for writing a biblical epic in English. By means of a few references to the manuscript, Jacobs establishes that Milton had been planning his epic for a long time and that the poem he finally wrote turned out to be different from what he had initially planned. Jacobs also considers briefly how best to characterize Milton’s beliefs, concluding (rightly, I think) that Milton cannot be adequately characterized as a Quaker or a Puritan or a Calvinist. He walked his own path. Along the way, Jacobs mentions the heterodox De Doctrina Christiana, which he accepts as Milton’s own, but decides not to “attempt to use” it “to elucidate the theology of Paradise Lost,” since “The poem is its own project of theological inquiry and should be allowed to speak for itself.”
The rest of chapter two reviews the poem, foregrounding “three major themes…that would dominate the post-Milton future: government, sexual politics, and theology proper.” This selection, Jacobs is careful to remind us, produces a “simplified and distorted account, distorted to reflect the future life of the poem.” Given his purposes, he presents “the poem as a series of musical movements.” Books I-III lay out the governing concern of the poem: “the ways of God require justification” because “when God the Father could have destroyed Satan and the other rebel angels, he chose not to, and instead allowed Satan to come to this newly created earth” to tempt Adam and Eve. Jacobs comments that “it would be hard to deny that such behavior requires justification. But this is a nettle Milton boldly grasps.”
Books IV-VIII introduce the beauty of the created order, including Adam and Eve, and Raphael warns them concerning their enemy. Book IX provides controversial backstory for the temptation and fall as well as describing the fall itself; Jacobs is most expansive here, introducing additional details from Milton’s life as context for his representation of Eve (a lightning-rod drawing critical dispute almost since the poem’s first publication). The final books of the poem (X-XII) deal with the aftereffects of the fall, including especially anticipations of God’s gracious response to human sin in the future sending of the Son.
The book’s remaining chapters offer a highly selective—but judicious and illuminating—series of episodes in the reception of the poem. Chapter three traces responses to the poem in its first hundred years. After the restoration of the monarchy, John Dryden (who had worked with Milton for a time in Cromwell’s government) sought Milton’s permission to develop “a dramatic adaptation of Paradise Lost in heroic couplets.” Jacobs wonders whether Dryden’s adaptation ought to be regarded as praising Milton or correcting him. Elsewhere Dryden is the first to suggest that Milton’s poem represents Satan heroically, but he also compares Milton’s greatness with the greatness of Homer and Virgil.
A generation after Dryden, Joseph Addison praised the excellence of Paradise Lost while rejecting Milton’s polemics in support of regicide. Addison recognizes that neither Adam nor Satan is the hero of the poem; as Jacobs explains, “in Milton’s poem Messiah is the protagonist, Satan the antagonist, and Adam and Eve the field of battle.” Samuel Johnson disliked Milton as a man but praised Milton’s poem. In contrast with Addison, for whom Milton’s treatment of Adam and Eve made the poem humanly interesting, Johnson thought the uniqueness of their unfallen condition a barrier to understanding for ordinary sinners like the rest of us. At the end of the poem’s first century, William Cowper reverenced Milton’s stature as a poet.
Jacobs tells the story of Milton’s fortunes among the Romantics in chapter four. Blake’s Milton imagines a “Purgatorial correction…directed at Milton’s perverted theology and his cruelty to the women in his life.” In Blake’s imagination, Milton would now recognize that his poem made an idol of God by patterning God on earthly kings. Most famously, Blake claimed that “Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Variations on this claim shape the responses of other Romantic writers, particularly “four members of the most extraordinary English family of that era: the Godwins and the Shelleys.” Mary Wollstonecraft attacks Milton’s representation of Eve. Though she admires “Milton’s pleasing picture of paradisaical happiness” (her words), she is more impressed by the sublimity of Milton’s Satan. William Godwin “follows Dryden in naming Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost.” Percy Shelley compared his hero Prometheus with Milton’s Satan, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein represents Victor Frankenstein as a creator who has abandoned his creation—implying, by means of her allusions to Paradise Lost, that God similarly abandoned Adam and Eve.
The opening pages of chapter five survey responses to Milton during the Victorian period. Several of these are entertaining (such as Mark Twain’s assertion that “it meets [the] definition of a classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read”), but in Jacobs’s assessment, “Generally speaking, the Victorian era proved to be one that domesticated or marginalized Paradise Lost.” By the beginning of the twentieth century, the poem had become canonical, admired (by Virginia Woolf, for example) as impressive poetry, but somewhat baffling for secular readers because of its serious treatment of religious belief. “So far,” Jacobs says after mentioning comments by Woolf and J. Middleton Murray and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, “the twentieth-century responses to Paradise Lost are what one might expect of responses to assured classics: a chorus of respect interspersed with arias of protest. But in the middle third of the twentieth century a greater debate about Milton began.” This “greater debate” moves beyond considering the merits or demerits of Milton’s poetry to consider his belief.
The greater debate begins with Charles Williams, a relative outsider to the academic orthodoxy and a close friend of C. S. Lewis. In an introduction to Milton’s poetry, “Williams took the contemporary questions about the qualities of Milton’s verse as an opportunity to affirm his wholehearted agreement with Milton’s theology; and in so doing, he set the readerly cat among the scholarly pigeons.” Lewis’s landmark Preface to Paradise Lost followed Williams, insisting on taking seriously Milton’s Christianity. In Preface Lewis thus combines literary criticism with theological apologetics. In Milton’s God William Empson accepts Lewis’s claim that Milton’s theology matters, but on Empson’s reading the tensions in Paradise Lost expose the moral inadequacies of Christian orthodoxy.
The third great landmark in this controversy is Stanley Fish’s book Surprised by Sin, “a witty and brilliant attempt to explain, and to transcend, the argument between Lewis and Empson by declaring that both were right—and wrong.” Fish insists that the moral ambiguities of Paradise Lost function as traps for the reader, effectively tempting the reader into faulty responses to Satan and sin in order to then correct the reader’s understanding. Milton’s poem requires a choice between “absolute faith and equally absolute unbelief, neither of which we ever want to accept as absolute.”
Jacobs’s final chapter traces echoes of Paradise Lost in popular culture. Several of these are intriguing: allusions in films, in novels, and in video games, as well as adaptations and translations. (I’ve added to my reading list Christopher Fry’s libretto for Krzysztof Penderecki’s operatic adaptation of Paradise Lost.) Perhaps the most interesting portion of this chapter is an account of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Like Blake, Pullman regards Satan as heroically defiant; like Empson, Pullman despises Christianity. Jacobs is fair but clear: “His Dark Materials is not a wholly successful work—the first book is utterly brilliant, but the subsequent volumes succumb to didacticism and a Manichaean sensibility” (Jacobs does not mention Pullman’s particular antipathy for Lewis). Jacobs rightly recognizes that Pullman’s description of Christianity “is cringe-inducingly simplistic.” In an “Afterword,” however, Jacobs agrees with Pullman’s sense that Paradise Lost “will not go away.”
Jacobs’s biography of Paradise Lost will not shift the focus of Milton studies, though it might remind Milton specialists why they were attracted to Milton to begin with. For general readers, the book is an accessible, thought-provoking review of key moments from the history of the epic’s reception. Jacobs makes rich use of well-chosen anecdotal material (don’t neglect his footnotes), framed by his own clear prose.
In his conclusion, Jacobs quotes Milton to invite readers to “give [it] due audience, and attend” this poem. I second this invitation—and add to it my commendation of Jacobs’s own book.