Inside "Paradise Lost": Reading the Designs of Milton's Epic by David Quint (review)

The relationship of Paradise Lost to classical epic has always excited debate. Joseph Addison praised John Milton for conforming with established heroic norms, but many twentieth-century critics saw Paradise Lost as an "anti-epic," written against the heroic tradition. A separate but related question concerns Milton's allusions—Paradise Lost is full of echoes of earlier poems, but there is no consensus about their nature and function. Are they commonplace topoi that serve only to signal Milton's claim to epic status, or are they, as Davis P. Harding argued in The Club of Hercules: Studies in the Classical Background of "Paradise Lost" (1962), "covert allusions" that offer implicit critical commentary on characters and action? Inside "Paradise Lost" addresses neither of these questions directly, but it is clear from the first sentence where David Quint stands: "The message of Paradise Lost is make love, not war" (1). In Quint's view, Milton's epic is marital, not martial, and most of the poem's allusions serve an ironic purpose, either to Satanize epic or expose Satan's epic fails. Some might think this argument old-fashioned, especially since the very notion of "allusion" has been questioned in recent decades, both by postmodernists who prefer "intertextuality" and by classicists who have argued that many of Milton's supposed allusions are illusions imagined by ingenious critics who have been selective with classical texts. Charles Martindale in John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (1986) and William Porter in Reading the Classics and "Paradise Lost" (1993) have both offered searching criticisms of Harding's critical method. Ignoring this opposition, Quint relies on his own ingenuity and formidable learning to argue in Harding's tradition for critical allusions that serve as interpretative keys. It is no small tribute to Quint that the overwhelming majority of his examples are convincing, but the book would be more impressive even than it is if he had addressed the arguments of those critics who have wanted to reduce the number of allusions in the editorial canon. Quint finds more allusions than anyone before him.

He sometimes overreaches himself. In his final chapter, "Leaving Eden," he builds an extensive argument on a supposed allusion to Tasso when Satan overleaps the walls of Paradise like a prowling wolf that "Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold" (4.187). Quint informs us that "the hungry wolf had described Tasso's crusader Rinaldo during the eleventh-century conquest of Jerusalem in the Gerusalemme Liberata. . . The hero is standing outside the Al-Aqsa mosque" (244). For Quint, this is enough to establish an implicit parallel between Paradise and Solomon's temple. He thinks that the supposed allusion to Tasso is intended to warn readers against making an idol of the garden. That is a lot to read into a simile that mentions neither mosque nor temple, especially since wolf similes are common in epic. Quint acknowledges the biblical precedent (John 10:1) and admits that "behind Rinaldo lies Virgil's Turnus" (244), but sticks to his view that the primary allusion is to Tasso. Since Rinaldo is "standing" (not leaping), there is a closer parallel with Ariosto's Rodomonte who leaps over the moat of Paris "with one bound" (Orlando Furioso 16:20), but a skeptic might retort that there is no allusion in Milton's simile, just a topos. Is there any epic that does not have a wolf simile?

Quint's method has its dangers then, but it would be churlish to emphasize his few excesses when Inside "Paradise Lost" has so many triumphs. He is particularly good on the poem's first two books, discussed in his first two chapters. He demonstrates that Milton's book one is an ironic reversal of book two of Homer's Iliad. We encounter the same features, but in reverse order. In Homer, "bee simile, assembly in...