Sure, “Paradise Lost” Is Radical, but Did You Know It Was Sexy?
BooksA new study charts John Milton’s influence on revolutionary thinkers but misses the sheer seductiveness of his masterwork.By Merve EmreDecember 16, 2024“Paradise Lost” has long proved popular with revolutionary thinkers.Illustration by Laurie AvonOn winter nights in the early sixteen-sixties, a blind poet lay awake in his bed and dreamed of the universe. Before his eyes swam suns and stars. A celestial light, visible to him alone, revealed a procession of images: first, a great battle in Heaven, between Satan’s rebel angels and the armies of God, who chased the rebels into a new realm, Hell; next, God’s creation of Earth and the inhabitants of Paradise, chief among them Adam and Eve; then a glimpse of Satan, who flew from Hell to tempt Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; and, finally, man’s exile from Paradise. Into the poet’s mind flowed twenty or thirty unbroken verses. Alas, his blindness meant that he had to wait until morning for an amanuensis to arrive and preserve them in writing. The poet would sit impatiently, one leg flung over the arm of his chair, and cry, “I want to be milked!”Such is the legend of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” It may be an apocryphal story but feels true to the poem; it was as if God had filled the poet to the brim, until he had to be drained by the hands of mere mortals. Onto the page spilled more than ten thousand lines of the richest and most resourceful blank verse in the English language, arranged into ten books in 1667, then rearranged into twelve in 1674. The subject was nothing less than the whole of human history, as proposed by the thunderous invocation of Book I:Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruitOf that forbidden tree, whose mortal tasteBrought death into the world, and all our woe,With loss of Eden, till one greater manRestore us, and regain the blissful seatSing heavenly Muse. . . .To read these lines aloud is to feel the gravity and the intensity of their ambition. It is to hear their strange music: the first line held a beat too long and punctuated by the sharp explosions of breath in “first” and “fruit”; the hissing of “taste,” “loss,” “us,” and “bliss,” which snake down to the command “Sing heavenly Muse.” Milton founded his style on the impersonality of ancient epic, and the resulting poem can feel more like the anonymous product of history than the effort of a single mind. No wonder the legend of divine inspiration persists. God, in the poem’s account of Genesis, had infused “vital virtue” and “vital warmth” through profound darkness. The poet, too, filled his darkness with a divine stream of words, and through these words a whole cosmos spun into view.Milton claimed that his purpose was to “justify the ways of God to men”—to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful God could have made man “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” The answer demanded poetry, not doctrine, and a practice of prosody liberated from what Milton denounced as “the modern bondage of rhyming.” His Muse dictated to him in an “answerable style,” an “unpremeditated verse” that featured few jangling couplets but a wealth and variety of rhetorical flourishes. They include Milton’s Latinate tendency to invert the usual English order of subject, verb, and object; his Homeric catalogues of the angels in Hell and the creatures on Earth; his elaborate tropes, which layered references to Greek and Roman epics, medieval romance, Renaissance cosmology, imperial conquest, and the English Commonwealth onto the Biblical story of creation. Floating above it all was an air of learned majesty, a cool radiance that compelled admiration but, in the centuries since, has not always spurred delight.What We’re ReadingDiscover notable new fiction and nonfiction.Part of the aloofness of “Paradise Lost” comes from Milton’s world view, forged during the English Civil War, which abolished the monarchy in favor of Parliamentary rule. His passionate commitment to freedom landed him in the employ of the new regime, Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, as one of its most successful polemicists. Milton’s 1649 pamphlet “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” printed two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, mounted a strident defense of regicide: “It is not, neither ought to be the glory of a Protestant State, never to have put their King to death; It is the glory of a Protestant King never to have deserv’d death.” Yet his republicanism had a Puritan cast: his aversion to one ruler, the King, was intensified by his devotion to another, God, who he believed ought to be worshipped without the intercession of bishops and other church hierarchy. His strain of Protestantism, Arminianism, was unusual in its belief that God offered salvation to all (rather than just the “elect”), but that each man must prove himself deserving of it through the exercise of his free will. In “Paradise Lost,” the shifting relations between Satan and God, God and the Son, and God and man trace a philosophy of libert
On winter nights in the early sixteen-sixties, a blind poet lay awake in his bed and dreamed of the universe. Before his eyes swam suns and stars. A celestial light, visible to him alone, revealed a procession of images: first, a great battle in Heaven, between Satan’s rebel angels and the armies of God, who chased the rebels into a new realm, Hell; next, God’s creation of Earth and the inhabitants of Paradise, chief among them Adam and Eve; then a glimpse of Satan, who flew from Hell to tempt Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; and, finally, man’s exile from Paradise. Into the poet’s mind flowed twenty or thirty unbroken verses. Alas, his blindness meant that he had to wait until morning for an amanuensis to arrive and preserve them in writing. The poet would sit impatiently, one leg flung over the arm of his chair, and cry, “I want to be milked!”
Such is the legend of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” It may be an apocryphal story but feels true to the poem; it was as if God had filled the poet to the brim, until he had to be drained by the hands of mere mortals. Onto the page spilled more than ten thousand lines of the richest and most resourceful blank verse in the English language, arranged into ten books in 1667, then rearranged into twelve in 1674. The subject was nothing less than the whole of human history, as proposed by the thunderous invocation of Book I:
To read these lines aloud is to feel the gravity and the intensity of their ambition. It is to hear their strange music: the first line held a beat too long and punctuated by the sharp explosions of breath in “first” and “fruit”; the hissing of “taste,” “loss,” “us,” and “bliss,” which snake down to the command “Sing heavenly Muse.” Milton founded his style on the impersonality of ancient epic, and the resulting poem can feel more like the anonymous product of history than the effort of a single mind. No wonder the legend of divine inspiration persists. God, in the poem’s account of Genesis, had infused “vital virtue” and “vital warmth” through profound darkness. The poet, too, filled his darkness with a divine stream of words, and through these words a whole cosmos spun into view.
Milton claimed that his purpose was to “justify the ways of God to men”—to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful God could have made man “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” The answer demanded poetry, not doctrine, and a practice of prosody liberated from what Milton denounced as “the modern bondage of rhyming.” His Muse dictated to him in an “answerable style,” an “unpremeditated verse” that featured few jangling couplets but a wealth and variety of rhetorical flourishes. They include Milton’s Latinate tendency to invert the usual English order of subject, verb, and object; his Homeric catalogues of the angels in Hell and the creatures on Earth; his elaborate tropes, which layered references to Greek and Roman epics, medieval romance, Renaissance cosmology, imperial conquest, and the English Commonwealth onto the Biblical story of creation. Floating above it all was an air of learned majesty, a cool radiance that compelled admiration but, in the centuries since, has not always spurred delight.
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.
Part of the aloofness of “Paradise Lost” comes from Milton’s world view, forged during the English Civil War, which abolished the monarchy in favor of Parliamentary rule. His passionate commitment to freedom landed him in the employ of the new regime, Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, as one of its most successful polemicists. Milton’s 1649 pamphlet “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” printed two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, mounted a strident defense of regicide: “It is not, neither ought to be the glory of a Protestant State, never to have put their King to death; It is the glory of a Protestant King never to have deserv’d death.” Yet his republicanism had a Puritan cast: his aversion to one ruler, the King, was intensified by his devotion to another, God, who he believed ought to be worshipped without the intercession of bishops and other church hierarchy. His strain of Protestantism, Arminianism, was unusual in its belief that God offered salvation to all (rather than just the “elect”), but that each man must prove himself deserving of it through the exercise of his free will. In “Paradise Lost,” the shifting relations between Satan and God, God and the Son, and God and man trace a philosophy of liberty and necessity, hierarchy and equality, that was eccentric even in Milton’s time. To appreciate it requires understanding how, in his writings, freedom can be fortified by, and through, obedience to what is virtuous.
“Paradise Lost is a scandal, a monument to dead ideas, a petrification of the English tongue,” the great critic Geoffrey Hartman declared in 1982, marvelling at the survival of visionary poetry in a secular world. Many, however, have worked to assimilate it to modern orthodoxies, including, most recently, the British academic Orlando Reade, in his study “What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost” (Astra). Broadly, each of its twelve chapters narrates a book of “Paradise Lost” alongside the history of various readers to whom the poem was important, to show how its insistence on political freedom “influenced readers embedded in revolutionary struggles in America, France, Haiti, and elsewhere.”
Reade begins in 1948, in Norfolk Prison Colony, in Massachusetts, where a young Malcolm X reads “Paradise Lost” in the prison library and delivers “an astonishing interpretation” of it: Milton confirmed the views of Elijah Muhammad, the former leader of the Nation of Islam, on the origins of white supremacy. “In either volume 43 or 44 of The Harvard Classics, I read Milton’s Paradise Lost,” Malcolm X writes in his autobiography. “The devil, kicked out of Paradise, was trying to regain possession. He was using the forces of Europe, personified by the Popes, Charlemagne, Richard the Lionhearted, and other knights. I interpreted this to show that the Europeans were motivated and led by the devil.” Yet the devil is in the details, as it were. Milton’s work does not in fact appear in Volume 43 or 44 of the Harvard Classics. His Satan is kicked out of Heaven, not Paradise; it is Adam and Eve who are expelled from the latter. Apart from a glancing reference to Charlemagne, the forces of Europe are not personified in the poem.
Reade is not the first to use this passage from Malcolm X to claim that “Paradise Lost” speaks “to the radical needs of the present.” But what is the difference between a radical reading and a misreading? How far can one go in making Milton speak to contemporary concerns—scanning his work for nascent arguments about religious terrorism, or police abolition, or anti-capitalist models of work—before the poem itself becomes irrelevant? Perhaps a more authentically radical way to read “Paradise Lost” is to insist on the scandal of its strangeness, to yield to its alien vision. By honoring its balance between freedom and obedience, we may resist the temptation to rewrite our present political disgraces as original sin.
The scandal begins with Satan. He is nowhere in Genesis, but everywhere in “Paradise Lost”—the only character to cross from Heaven to Hell, and Hell to Earth, the first to speak into the darkness. The Muse is asked to sing of Satan before she sings of God’s creation: “Who first seduced” Adam and Eve “to that foul revolt?” The answer is one of the great accusations of the epic tradition:
We plunge into Hell, where Satan lies on a burning lake until God lifts his chains. Here is the poem’s first radical choice: Satan is its most attractive character, not despite his envy or his desire for revenge but because of it. We learn that the object of his envy was the Son, whom God anointed Messiah, elevating him over the angels. The real reason for Satan’s rebellion is his “injured merit”—what C. S. Lewis, in his study of the poem, called “a well known state of mind which we can all study in domestic animals, children, film-stars, politicians, or minor poets.” Lewis knew that Satan’s charisma owed much to his sense of ressentiment, and that such ressentiment, whether in poets or in angels, could be cultivated to appear more principled and sympathetic than it really was. In the first two books of “Paradise Lost,” Satan politicizes his wounded pride, using all his powers of persuasiveness to build support in Hell for the righteousness of his rebellion against God.
No doubt Milton risked building support for Satan among his readers. Satan is harsh and hypnotic, romantic and self-pitying in his despair. He is outfitted in the poem’s most illusory similes: his massive shield hangs on his shoulder “like the moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views”; his spear makes “the tallest pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills” look like a wand. He emits the sickly light of a solar eclipse. Place his polluted aura next to the bright skirts of God, and you will see how low this superior angel has sunk. Yet how his ruined grandeur moves him to speak! Book I roils with Satan’s exhortations to his defeated army to test God’s omnipotence again:
Often, his arguments for freedom resemble Milton’s own. “Here at least / We shall be free,” Satan proclaims of Hell, a line that would fit right into Milton’s 1660 treatise “The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.” Reade, who is mostly sympathetic to Satan, casts the rebel angels as revolutionary subjects. He notes the poem’s influence on Thomas Jefferson, who copied Satan’s speeches into his commonplace book, and the pioneering abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, an African Briton who likened the torture of enslaved people to the torture inflicted by God on Satan’s army. But the sound of a speech is as important as its sense. After the rebel angels rise, their first order of business is to build a glorious hall called Pandemonium and shrink themselves to fit into it, becoming “less than smallest dwarfs.” Their voices dwindle, into the tinny, “jocund music” of “faerie elves.” They may strike maddening notes, but they are easy to ignore.
Putting Satan in perspective requires constant vigilance. One must avert one’s eyes from Pandemonium’s false glitter to perceive the corruption of Hell:
Satan makes his rule seem more equitable than God’s, by claiming that his intentions are logically unimpeachable: no one could want to be king of the damned, and so “Devil with devil damned / Firm concord holds.” When the devils discuss how to avenge themselves, their plan—one of them will fly to Earth to corrupt God’s latest creation, man—seems arrived at through open debate. But it is secretly Satan’s idea, planted by his second-in-command, Beelzebub. Immediately, Satan volunteers to play the self-sacrificing hero. “The monarch,” Milton writes, “prevented all reply.” What looks like consensus is, in fact, decision by fiat. By his smooth tongue, Satan inaugurates in Hell the injustice that he accused God of perpetrating in Heaven.
Hell is dark, obscuring distinctions between good and evil. When Satan lands on Earth at the end of Book III, the phenomenon of light, which God created just days before, is new to him. Only now can he apprehend how changed he is, how miserable. He recoils from himself at the beginning of Book IV: “Now conscience wakes despair / That slumbered, wakes the bitter memory / Of what he was.” But misery loves company, and Satan’s plan to recruit man to his cause turns on arousing a desire for freedom: “Hence I will excite their minds / With more desire to know, and to reject / Envious commands, invented with design / To keep them low.”
In his 1654 treatise “The Second Defence of the People of England,” Milton wrote, “Know that to be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave.” By the sun’s blinding rays, we can perceive how depraved Satan’s freedom is. By one hand, he is bound to himself, to his impiety, his recklessness, his envy and pride, his guilt and spite. “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell,” he laments. By the other hand, he is bound to the Almighty, whom, as the critic John Guillory has observed, Satan imitates. But God’s authority tends toward reason and grace; Satan’s is a poor, perverse copy. His every thought is shaped in reaction to God’s glory. It is as if God had never lifted Satan’s chains.
Compare Satan with God, about whom Reade has little to say except (in a chapter on Toussaint Louverture and Baron Vastey) that he is “intemperate” and probably a cat person. This seems inadequate, but understandably so—it is hard to know what to say about God. In Book III, he is an awesome presence but a curiously insubstantial one. Whenever we meet him, he is surrounded by angels raising hallelujahs, dazzled by his gorgeous armories. He praises and condemns with a stiffness that verges on dispassion. Milton could hardly have made God a creature of variety and contradiction. The more we see of God, as the critic Samuel Fallon has observed, the stronger our sense of his limits: “He cannot die; he cannot suffer; ultimately he cannot change.”
To God’s right sits his radiant Son, who hears from his Father all that is to happen to man: he will fall, but he will be saved “not of will in him, but grace in me.” Their conversation points to the poem’s second radical choice: God and the Son are neither identical nor coexistent. The Son was made by God and, like all God’s creatures, is subject to the trial of his free will. God anoints him Messiah, but, by offering meekly to die for man’s sins, the Son proves himself deserving of it—“By merit more than birthright Son of God, / Found worthiest to be so by being good.” His humble martyrdom opposes Satan’s preening self-sacrifice, just as his “being good” inverts Satan’s source of “merit,” “his bad eminence.”
Yet the mirrored acts of Satan and the Son show how they are necessary to each other, as sin is necessary to virtue. The unfolding of God’s plan reminds us of what Hartman called the counterplot of “Paradise Lost.” God’s “imperturbable providence” opposes all of Satan’s agitated activity. It lends the Almighty his cold formality and the poem its feeling of supreme prescience. The reader not only knows what is to come—the fall of man, the salvation of mankind, the triumph of obedience and free will—but believes that it is good.
Satan is Reade’s antihero, but “Paradise Lost” is really Adam and Eve’s poem. The reader first spies them through Satan’s eyes when he enters Eden in Book IV. Much has been made of his first impression:
Satan’s envious gaze seeks hierarchy everywhere. But sexual difference in Eden is not as rigid as it seems. Adam’s large front “declared / Absolute rule,” and Eve’s hair “implied / Subjection,” but those verbs describe only their outward aspects. Adam’s rule cannot be imposed; it requires “gentle sway.” Eve’s subjection cannot be ordered; she yields “with coy submission, modest pride,” as if marriage, in its pure state, were a game, designed to flatter a man’s superiority while letting a woman maintain control. Rule and subjection are calibrated by appearances that the first couple interprets guided by their faculty of reason.
It is this reason that Satan attempts to impair. He waits until they are asleep and, in a mockery of divine inspiration, whispers into Eve’s ear, stirring her imagination as any malcontented poet might—by raising “vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires” to overrun her virtue. When, on waking all hot and bothered, she tells Adam that she dreamed of eating the forbidden fruit, his murmurs of assurance calm her. “Evil into the mind of god or man,” he says, “may come and go.” Part of the genius of “Paradise Lost” lies in how it seeds small moments of error and doubt in Paradise, without marring the perfection of God’s creation.
Much as Satan arouses Eve’s imagination, so the “affable archangel” Raphael proceeds to arouse Adam’s. Coming down to Earth in Book V to warn Adam of Satan’s plan, Raphael stays through Book VIII and recounts the war in Heaven, replete with Satan’s invention of cannon fire and the mountaintops that the armies of God flip upside down and hurl at the rebel angels. “This must be unusually stupid Science Fiction,” William Empson wrote. But stupid stories have the effect of prompting questions, and Raphael starts to wonder if he should have told Adam anything in the first place. “The secrets of another world, perhaps / Not lawful to reveal?” he asks. Too late: Adam and Eve now know “of things so high and strange”—things “so unimaginable as hate in heaven.” They know that someone has refused to obey and, in doing so, has forced an irrevocable change.
Milton is not praised enough for how artfully he represented the first seduction. There is nothing impersonal or cool about it; it is heated and urgent. (Alastair Fowler, in his meticulous edition of the poem, noted that it contains what is likely the first use in English literature of the word “sex” to mean doing the deed.) Satan’s seduction of Eve had to define the very idea of what seduction was: an act of irresistible trickery on the part of the seducer; a moral and an intellectual failing on the part of the seduced. As Eve says to Adam:
The incantatory, reversed repetition (“his fraud . . . thy fear”) catches the interlocked logic of seduction. On the one hand, Satan’s success seems inevitable, as if eating the fruit was the only choice Eve could have made, and thus no choice at all. On the other, her disobedience results from her gullibility and erroneous reason. Seduction brings the poem’s central predicament—how to reconcile free will and divine decree—down from Heaven to Earth. The poem’s psychologically acute, domestic framing of this is Milton’s third radical choice.
Book IX begins with an argument between the first husband and wife about—what else?—work. More than Adam, Eve is sensitive to the passage of time and she insists on good time management. “With thee conversing I forget all time,” she told Adam in Book IV, and now her praise of their chatter turns into a complaint about how it “intermits / Our day’s work brought to little.” The garden outgrows her efforts to tame it. The plants that she lops and prunes return, in a night, to their wild luxuriance, leaving no trace of her efforts. Without Adam, Eve proposes, she could work intently enough to make a lasting impression on Eden. She would be able to distinguish between one day and the next, past and present, by means of her own hands.
Adam disagrees, claiming that God intended for them to have fun together; he does not grasp the real issue at hand. Eve wants something different from what he wants, and, whatever it may be, her inscrutable desire asserts her separateness from him. “So absolute she seems / And in herself complete,” he told Raphael in Book VIII. Again, a compliment flips into a complaint, that the woman who was created from his side now insists on straying from it. “Leave not the faithful side / That gave thee being, still shades thee and protects,” Adam warns her. How can the balance of their marriage hold when Eve resists Adam’s “gentle sway”? It is an unanswerable question, and so Adam deflects. He trusts her, he swears. It’s Satan he doesn’t trust.
Autonomy—the fantasy of being absolute and complete, of making choices in her own right, on her own time—is, for Eve, the ideal condition to test her virtue. “And what is faith, love, virtue unassayed / Alone, without exterior help sustained?” she asks Adam. Reade, like many, connects this line to Milton’s argument in “Areopagitica,” his 1644 defense of the freedom to print: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised & unbreathed.” But the pamphlet argued only that virtue should be tested, not, as Eve contends, that it must be tested in solitude, away from those who might help one to exercise one’s reason well. Throughout “Paradise Lost,” a freedom that fails to acknowledge its provisional nature, or the particular communities in which it must be exercised, is a lure to evil. It is a satanic freedom to possess “a mind not to be changed by others,” no matter the circumstances.
We see this in the poem’s most breathtaking scene, when Satan finds Eve alone, and Milton dangles the possibility of a reverse seduction before us:
What if Eve had overawed Satan into good? But no: by now, Satan has spent the whole poem talking himself into the necessity of his position. Ressentiment is the snake that eats its own tail, and it is as a snake, a gorgeous tower of green-and-gold coils, with flashing eyes and a high, crested head, that Satan steals into Eve’s solitude. He rises and steers himself through the roses and the myrrh, shakes the leaves to get her attention, bows before her, and licks the ground. His tongue is out; his flattery will follow, a medley of praise for her ravishing beauty and disdain for her surroundings, “this enclosure wild,” where there is only one person to admire her. “Who sees thee?” he asks. The woman whose husband’s talk distracted her from her work—the husband who assured her, moments before, that “sweet intercourse” was “to brute denied”—will marvel at the “language of man pronounced / By tongue of brute.” Did her husband lie? Or is he a rube?
In the 1643 treatise “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” Milton had described a good spouse as “a fit conversing soul.” Adam—great in the bower, but a bit of a bore—speaks in paeans, but the snake speaks boldly, sensuously. He whispers to Eve about “the sharp desire” he had “of tasting those fair apples,” and how doing so gave him speech and reason. He recalls the longing and the envy of all who watched him wrap his whole body around the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge and drain its fruit. What his ability to speak promises her, implicitly, is change. This sparks her ardent imagination more than any husband tidying the garden could. If the apple “gave elocution to the mute,” what might it do for Eve, who is already perfect?
Eve plucks. She eats. As the serpent promised, everything changes. Disobedience begets secrecy and selfishness. Should she tell Adam, or should she keep her knowledge to herself, “the more to draw his love, / And render me more equal?” she wonders. When she tells Adam that she has eaten the fruit, he eats, too, out of firm faith and fear; he cannot imagine life without her. Yet they will never be as they were.
There was inequality in Eden before the fall, but there was no misogyny. This is the first horror (along with nakedness and great guilt sex) to bloom in Paradise, before Sin and Death pave their path from Hell to Earth in Book X. Adam upbraids shamefaced Eve, placing the blame for their fall squarely on her: “Thus it shall befall / Him who to worth in women overtrusting / Lets her will rule.” By the time the angel Michael arrives to show Adam the future, in Books XI and XII, Adam and Eve have fought and reconciled. But the fresh sting of “mutual accusation” still pricks at them as they leave the garden.
Where do they go? In a brilliant and approachable study, “Inside Paradise Lost,” David Quint traces Adam and Eve’s “wandering steps” out of the epic poem and into the godless world of the novel. The collapse of the paradisiacal balance between freedom and obedience would seed the novel’s grand themes: marriage, seduction, betrayal, regret, and all the stuff of “the home epic,” in the words of George Eliot, the subtlest of the Milton readers whom Reade discusses. The novel grasped the fallen “conditions of marriage itself,” Eliot wrote in “Middlemarch”—that there was “something even awful in the nearness it brings”; that it demanded “self-suppression and tolerance.” Adam’s eye no longer declared “Absolute rule.” Eve no longer appeared “absolute.” Hand in hand, man and woman would be bound in an uncertain, unfixed fellowship. They would have to make their solitary way into the future. ♦
