Leaving Paradise: The Final Books of Paradise Lost

From the day it saw print in 1667 and for the next two centuries the status of Paradise Lost as the preeminent achievement in English poetry was largely undisputed. Nearly everyone took the cue from John Dryden, who read the epic shortly after it appeared. “This man cuts us all out—and the ancients too,” Milton’s great rival reportedly declared in grudging admiration. In the eighteenth century Milton’s poem embodied both the beautiful (Joseph Addison) and the sublime (Edmund Burke). The Romantics approached Paradise Lost reverently for its poetry—less so for its theology. In the United States, where Whitman and Stephen Crane were forging a nineteenth-century poetics that was vernacular, free form, and emphatically new world, one might expect Paradise Lost to have seemed fusty and irrelevant. Not so. Margaret Fuller contrarily championed Milton as a more American author than America had yet produced. And Anna Julia Cooper in A Voice from the South urged African Americans to read Paradise Lost because Milton was “the right poet for a people writhing under a mighty wrong.”

In the twentieth century the consensus evaporated. Paradise Lost was kicked out of “the great tradition.” “Milton is unsatisfactory,” according to T. S. Eliot, who dismissed his politics, theology, and psychology, as well as the poetry. Ezra Pound added a dollop of smarm, mocking Milton for writing better Latin than English. Sylvia Townsend Warner asked Chaucer’s biographer, Marchette Chute, to abstain from the “melancholy subject” of a life of Milton because there was “quite enough to depress one as it is, without being reminded of Milton.” And some early (though not later) feminist critics, convinced of his misogyny, secured a prime spot for Milton in the pantheon of ignoble male writers. English departments kept Paradise Lost on life support for the required edification of unwilling undergraduates, who typically encountered only excerpts yanked out of the context of the grand narrative arc of spiritual warfare, human vulnerability, and devastating loss. No wonder they found it baffling and tedious!

But the whirligig of literary taste rotates as inexorably as Fortune’s wheel. And in recent years Milton’s epic has been reclaiming its nineteenth-century status as a popular poem. The roll call of lively reconsiderations of Milton issued since the year 2000 includes: How Milton Works, John Milton: A Hero of Our Time, Delirious Milton, Why Milton Matters, Milton’s Words, and feistiest of all, Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? Milton is even thriving in the classroom again. After decades of barely sustainable courses centered on Paradise Lost, by the turn of the new century I had waiting lists of students eager to read Milton. Discussions were both passionate and informed, and students boldly recited long flights of blank verse suspended over many lines, with caesuras intact and enjambments scrupulously observed.

Despite this resurgent enthusiasm for Paradise Lost there has remained some dead space. Even in good times the last two books haven’t gotten a lot of love. John Rogers’s popular series of twenty-four video lectures on Milton (itself an index of the contemporary shift in taste) takes up books eleven and twelve in gingerly fashion, acknowledging that readers usually dislike the grim, pedagogical style of the archangel Michael who speaks in “labored declarative sentences.” Is there any hope of rehabilitating what are often lamented as uninspired add-ons to an otherwise magnificent construction? The most promising opening for a revaluation of the final books of Milton’s epic comes not from any of the laudable recent academic studies but from someone who read it two centuries ago.

On a freezing winter afternoon in 1802 Dorothy Wordsworth reached for her copy of Paradise Lost. She and her brother William had just finished a meal at Dove Cottage in Grasmere and she read aloud book eleven—a confounding choice for all those readers who have felt the final two books a tedious anticlimax. A falling off from “sublimity” in these books—the attribute of Paradise Lost prized by Samuel Johnson—may have prompted Johnson’s notoriously bland judgment that “none ever wished it longer than...