Reading Paradise Lost by David Hopkins (review)

The publication of Reading Paradise Lost by David Hopkins provides non-Renaissance literature professionals the opportunity to learn what specialists have known for many years: David Hopkins is not only a meticulous scholar but also one of the finest teachers in the profession. Reading Paradise Lost is the latest offering in the Reading Poetry series produced by Blackwell. The stated purpose of these slender yet informative volumes is to draw upon “the pedagogical expertise of the most esteemed critics in the field” and “to make poetry accessible to a diversity of readers” (ii). Hopkin’s direct and yet sophisticated treatment of John Milton’s (1608–1674) epic successfully fulfills both of these expectations but also offers far more. This is not merely a guided tour of the poem. Hopkins provides a strong polemic and plea for the reassertion of many older and discarded practices of reading Paradise Lost (1674) and calls for a rejection of certain common critical assumptions about the poem. His clearly evident and well-crafted conservative argument pervades this “guide.”

Hopkin’s critical approach lines up with what many scholars are calling “new aestheticism;” which is to say, readers should never forget that a poem is, first and foremost, a poem. His thesis is simple: “Paradise Lost is a narrative poem, not a work of theology, or philosophy, or political polemic, and that it works on readers’ minds according to the laws and procedures of narrative poetry, not according to those which govern the other kinds of discourse” (1). He contends that bad readings of the poem often spring from losing sight of the above. After providing a thorough discussion of the historical critical reception of Paradise Lost, Hopkins highlights that early critics of the poem did not consider the poem a “problem” to be solved nor did they see the necessity to evaluate the success or failure of Milton’s “argument.” According to Hopkins, critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries chiefly praised the poem for the following: “It achieves its objective of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’ not by deductive reasoning or theological dogma, but by conducting us through an experimental process which conveys to us both the goodness of the divine dispensation which it imagines, and the perils of rejecting that dispensation”(6). Although this general view of Milton was once the norm, nineteenth-century critics redirected the focus of the poem because “Paradise Lost contains, at various moments arguments that are close to those of philosophy or theology” (6). Hopkin’s insists that this tendency to approach the poem as if it were “theology” or “philosophy” has led to multiple mis-readings of the poem and that many of these assumptions have been passed on from one generation of critics to the next without being properly vetted and questioned. According to Hopkins, some commentators have moved “from talking about Milton’s ideas and arguments as they are presented in the poem into discussing them as if they were independent entities, abstractable form the ‘progress of the fable and the tenor of the dialogue’” (6).

Hopkin’s identifies the genesis of the trend to see the poem as a “problem” with Edmond Scherer (1815–89). Whereas Voltaire (1794–1778) had greatly admired the poetic world created by Milton, his fellow countryman Scherer is distracted by his personal assessment of Milton’s primary source text the Bible: “I have often admired how barren the subject appears, and how fruitful it grows under his hands” (10). That is to say, that Scherer has already pre-determined and qualified that a good poem could not possibly derive from Biblical themes. To enjoy the poem, therefore, Scherer maintains that: “There are in Paradise Lost two things which must be kept apart: an epic poem and a theodicy” (10). Preferring to see Paradise Lost as theodicy and rejecting it as a poem leads Scherer to conclusions that are now all too familiar. Scherer builds his argument upon a close reading of the narrator’s opening comments in Book 1 of Paradise Lost...