On Being Haunted by Milton’s Paradise Lost

Professor Jennings is as complacent as could be in his three-piece, brown velvet suit, speaking to his audience of college freshmen. 

“Now what can we say of John Milton’s Paradise Lost?” 

Those who have seen the 1978 film, National Lampoon’s Animal House, would be forgiven for not remembering this scene. In fact, Professor Jennings seems all too ready to forget it himself:

“It’s a long poem, written a long time ago, and I’m sure a lot of you have difficulty understanding what Milton was trying to say.” He chalks the name, “Satan,” on the board behind him but then loses interest as he levels with his students. “Don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He’s a little bit long-winded, he doesn’t translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.” 

The class is saved by the bell but not before Jennings adds: “But that doesn’t relieve you from your responsibility for this material.”

As it turns out, since Milton published the poem in 1667, few writers have found “relief” from Paradise Lost. It is long, and dense, and heavy-handed, but those aren’t the reasons why the poem imposes itself on history. For every criticism of the epic’s sometimes oppressive academic stature there exists a mark of its influence as an indelible creative spark behind countless other literary masterpieces.

Without Paradise Lost, we wouldn’t have the Promethean dreams of William Blake and Percey Shelley—or for that matter, the entire English Romantic movement. Gothic novels wouldn’t look the same. We wouldn’t be able to follow Melville’s Ishmael into Ahab’s inevitable quest for the white whale. It’s difficult to imagine nineteenth-century French poetry without the specter of Milton’s Satan bending the pens of Chateaubriand and Baudelaire. The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings wouldn’t be the same. And this only scratches the surface. 

Yet Milton’s influence isn’t like that of poets like Shakespeare or Chaucer. These writers inspire adaptations and model a certain freedom with language and ideas. Milton inspires as well, but his inspiration is as constraining as it is liberating.

A Poem of Paradoxes

Paradise Lost is experiencing something of a moment, due in part to Alan Jacobs’s recent book, Paradise Lost: A Biography. He says that “Paradise Lost is surely the greatest poem in the English language, but it is not lovable; and Milton is the prickliest of poets, full of what the Romans called superbia”—a vice of hubris and ambition that might also be used to describe Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and the titular Tarquinius Superbus. 

It is this paradox that affects both the beauty and creative suffocation left by the wake of Paradise Lost. I myself included a quotation from the poem on the back of the liturgy programs printed for my wedding, but I’ve also found myself visited by unwelcomed specters of Milton’s God when I write, teach, and even pray. 

Milton originally envisioned the poem as England’s first great epic. He entertained writing about the founding of Britain itself but ultimately landed on the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, preceded by the fall of the poem’s most compelling character, Satan. Paradise Lost’s beauty radiates from a man who was so in touch with the dual human experiences of disappointment and hope, captured in its final lines that depict the Edenic pair leaving the garden in anticipation of the promised messiah from whom their sin will be undone: 

Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitarie way.

The poem is stunning at times but at others overbearing. Although Satan’s charisma makes him its most popular character, it is God, generally referred to as “the Father,” that has proven to be the most troubling for readers. 

The Father sits in his heavenly seat and interacts almost exclusively with the Son, teaching him about his design for creation and addressing problems as they arise. Chief among these problems is the fact that Satan has escaped hell and is traveling to Eden to destroy the newly minted humans there. The Father has an answer to everything—as he should—but even though his words meet the demands of theological rigor, they characteristically fall short of satisfying the reader’s need for emotional connection. 

For example, the Father admits to the Son that humanity will fall victim to Satan’s sabotage, but rather than expressing sympathy or remorse, he exonerates himself from any blame in the matter. God asks, whose fault will it be?

Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all th' Ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood and them who faild;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.

“Freely they stood who stood.” The lines just don’t roll off the tongue like the narrator’s affectionate portrayal of Adam and Eve: “They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow.”

The Voice of God

The history of reading Paradise Lost is as much a history of reckoning with Milton’s God as with Satan. The postmodern critic, Stanley Fish, famous for popularizing what is known as the “Reader Response” theory of literary interpretation, famously made Milton’s Satan into an exemplar for how meaning inheres in the subjective experience of reading. We fall in love with Satan, he said, unaware of his seduction, only to realize our error when Eve bites into the fruit. In this way, the reader falls with Eve. 

It is the Father, though, that has caused more anxiety. If one were to list the characters of the poem in order from most dynamic to least, Satan and Eve would be at the top, followed by Beelzebub, Adam, and the Son, and below Chaos, Raphael, and the rest of the fallen angels, down at the bottom on his own, would be the Father. Modern readers have found the Father somewhere between quietly sovereign and despotic. 

In his 1961 book, Milton’s God, William Empson offered the “abdication theory.” According to this reading, the advent of evil in creation is a failure of the Father’s rule, and rather than taking responsibility, he transfers rule over creation to his son. Empson thinks that the father’s abdication was an organic outgrowth of the impossible task of writing a narrative poem about God. Other critics, like John Rumrich, have taken this further in suggesting that Milton intentionally makes the Father unworthy of his power. 

Yet wasn’t Milton a devoted Christian? How could he have portrayed God as abandoning his creation? It may surprise some to learn that after the Bible and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost was the most frequently assigned book to school children in the early American colonies. 

And therein lies the paradox of Paradise Lost. It is as if Milton inadvertently unkenneled an unwieldy master by writing in the voice of God. People sometimes forget that Milton was a religious and political radical and that it wasn’t particularly conservative of him to use such narrative license with God, free will, and sin. 

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the poet William Blake said that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters 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.” Blake’s lines are frequently misunderstood. Blake saw in Milton a brilliant unearthing of the false opposition between good and evil, God and the devil, when the real opposition, he thought, is between energy and stasis. The Father is the old, rigid institution of religion, and the devil represents curiosity, imagination, and passion. 

Blake was right about Milton’s tendentious relation to his dramatized God. It isn’t the tragic glory of Milton’s Satan that continues to haunt readers—and especially writers—as much as the illiberal figure of Milton’s God. 

I don’t mean the triune God but specifically “the Father,” since the Son and even the Holy Spirit—that “Heav’nly Muse” who “with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss” before the world was made—are interesting enough for Blake to consider them in the Devil’s party. More specifically, writers have conflated the Father with John Milton himself in their imaginations. As an author, he’s impressive, maybe so impressive as to be oppressive. 

And we can see evidence of this in the history of Milton’s reception by other writers. 

Milton's Ghost

In graduate school I was the research assistant of a Milton scholar who assigned to me the task of cataloguing every authorial reference to Milton and Paradise Lost from the time of its original publication to the present. And I mean every single one, in English at least, at a time before the assistance of high powered online search engines. I found novels and lyric poems, newspaper stories, romantic musings, revolutionary tracts, epic sequels, and nonfiction essays. My assistantship ended before the project was complete, but in the filing drawers of documents I collected, one characteristic of Milton’s reception seemed clear to me: 

Milton’s reputation was like that of a ghost. 

Not the good kind of spirit like a muse that inspires creative freedom but the demanding kind, like Seneca’s Tantalus and Thyestes or Hamlet’s father, who inspire action through fear. 

For Virginia Woolf, Milton was a “bogey,” a reflection of domineering male authority. Part of her impression, of course, stems from Milton’s hierarchical and even ontological differentiation of the sexes. On this aspect, Jessica Hooten Wilson addresses Milton directly, “Mr. Milton, let me insist that Christian women are made for God, not ‘for God in [man].’” But Woolf sensed Milton’s ghost outside his representation of Eve, in the audacious grandeur of his project. He achieves a form of beauty that is ambitious beyond eloquence. The poem exudes finality and stifles attempts to do anything less in scope. “Milton is a bogey; for he stands between us and our freedom,” writes Woolf.

It’s not as if Milton intended for his poem to supplement the Biblical narrative or even theology, but despite his attempts not to give this impression, writers still felt it. 

Shortly after its publication, John Dryden complained that Paradise Lost’s flaw is that it fails to account for the origin of evil. Milton presents a grisly family tree involving a female Sin, physically born out of Satan’s head, ravished by her Son, Death (conceived with Satan, her father). It’s the closest to Dante’s representational depiction of Lucifer that Milton gets. But that isn’t enough for Dryden. If Milton is going to write about the first fallen angel, then Dryden expects him to provide a full theological explanation. 

For certain, writers hold Milton accountable for more than he deserves. Epic poems are about the creation or destruction of great civilizations. And as an epic, Paradise Lost succeeds. As theology, it fails. As a supplement to the Bible, it fails. And apparently, as fuel for future inspiration, it also fails.

Or does it? For in each instance when an author calls out the burden of Milton’s authority there also arises a flame of creative tension. It’s telling that authors and critics tend to attribute the features of Paradise Lost to the man himself, typically referring to them as Milton’s own possessions—“Milton’s style,” “Milton’s Satan,” “Milton’s God.” But in so doing, writers do not refer to Samson Agonistes, Comus, or the forgettable Paradise Regained but to Paradise Lost exclusively. 

“Milton’s example cannot be escaped; it must be answered,” writes Christopher Ricks. Harold Bloom says that Milton is the largest figure in the “anxiety of influence,” the line of historical authors with which all writers must contend. His influence is as suffocating as it is inspiring.

Beyond Theological Poetics

And among the several reasons for this inherited feeling of obligation to Milton’s project—his depiction of the sexes, the scale of the epic’s setting, his mastery of the English language—is one central but complex characteristic of the poem: Milton positions the Judeo-Christian God in its dramatis personae. And even for those who have never read Paradise Lost, we are all forever wrestling with the consequences. 

We carry into the poem memories of Odysseus speaking with Athena and Orestes talking to Apollo, but Milton’s God is singular. The Son and the angels are the only characters that interact with him directly, but his authority is felt by everyone through the very fabric of his cosmos. The Earth hangs by a golden string from heaven. And on the level of language, every word spoken by Satan, Eve, and Adam is a mere approximation of the Father’s perfect foreknowledge. Every act of obedience and disobedience acquires its meaning within God’s counsel about free will. 

What is most fascinating to me about the impression we inherit of Milton’s authorial ghost is that he wrote from a place of extreme vulnerability. Politically, Milton had good reason to think he was in danger. His early tract, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, successfully advocated for the execution of King Charles I. At the time of the writing of Paradise Lost, Charles’s son had recently taken the throne, and Milton—blind and defeated—risked writing his epic anyway. 

Such vulnerability has poetic and theological dimensions too. Some of Satan’s most vicious arguments against the Father recapitulate Milton’s own attacks on the tyranny of non-elected monarchy. In other words, Milton didn’t take the easy way out. He hit “full send” on God, and in defending God’s justice he also sought to come to terms with his own failures. And so Milton placed himself in the company of Woolf, Blake, and all the other writers after him who felt judged by the God to whom he himself gave voice. 

Milton’s ghost dwells at the crossroads of language, narrative, and theology. That is where he sold his soul to a poetic endeavor “unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.” And as a result, there is no relief from Milton’s God. Milton’s poem got away from him, but he anticipated this, even hoped for it.