Waking up in Eden

I finally finished Paradise Lost.

I was trying to make it in 90 days, just as a goal, but I missed by a month-plus (I started, as you can see from my earlier post, "My Summer Reading," in early June).

Starting at 80-100 lines a sitting, I eventually settled on a pace of one book of the epic per week, and except in busy times, I kept to that. But as I got deeper into the story, I found that I could read much faster. The final book, for instance, I read in two brief sittings last Saturday.

That last book, save for its poignant final lines, is mostly a Biblically oriented set-up for Paradise Regained. Though I felt that it fit the overall narrative smoothly, the final book contained no stirring moments for me.

But I was surprised to find that the epic as a whole contained many such moments. I grew up thinking of Milton as a staid Puritan whose epic poem was some theological exegesis hung out on a spare "Adam and Eve" narrative to dry. That was not the case, except for the aforementioned Book XII.

I also remember being told in school that Satan was thought of, at least by some revisionist critics in the 1970s, as a kind of epic hero -- a sort of Bad Odysseus. But that's only defensible in the first four or five books. After that, Satan is clearly a supporting character, and Adam is the epic hero -- if a tragic one.

Overall, I found a few places for the parochial Milton, but so few they could easily be set in the context of his place and time without detracting from the story. I suspect he first fell from favor for his diehard Puritanism and devout Euro-centrism back when I was a student. If his reputation in the English literary canon sagged as a result, I'm for putting him back up there -- now that I've read his greatest work as a middle-aged adult.

Many speeches in the poem foreshadow the poetic literature to come. Adam, lamenting his fallen state while awaiting God's judgment, sounds like a modernist in the throes of existential alienation. Also, I see the style of the Romantics in Satan's daring flight to freedom and in the many rhapsodic descriptions of Eve, as well as in her speeches.

There's more: the archangels spout Milton's moral and teleological (teleology is the philosophy of purpose) viewpoints, and both concepts and language balance out like Pope and the Augustans*. The Victorians (Hopkins loved Milton) owe Miltonic diction and prosody such an obvious debt that ... well, why go on?

There's something else I mentioned in "My Summer Reading:" the Koran containing some of Satan's backstory that could have influenced Milton. The Muslim holy book also views Adam as a prophet, a knower of divine wisdom. In Paradise Lost, Adam's savanthood quietly emerges as the poem marches toward its concluding verses. There truly is something here -- but exactly what, I can't say, except that I think this great, lost poet of the English Civil War (and after) deserves some careful consideration along those lines.

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*I originally wrote "Pope and the Alexandrians" and managed to leave it that way for a year and a half! Odd how mistakes are funnier than jokes you mean to write.