As a teenager enamored of Thomas Wolfe’s massive rolling paragraphs, stilted syntax, and preposterous archaic vocabulary—"cold phthistic feet," anyone?—in Look Homeward, Angel, I stumbled onto Milton and thought him easily the best writer in our language. Polysyllabic adjectives, abundant semi-colons, suitably edgy subject matter: It was all there. In college I wrote my first paper on him: two double-spaced pages of size 12 Courier on the phrase "Tartarean Sulphur, and strange Fire." Because the paper was supposed to have been about Oedipus the King, I got a B+.
When I became a man—or at any rate a junior—I put away childish things. After reading my Leavis and returning to the Church, in that order, I began to see that Milton’s politics were facile, his theology an embarrassing roll of heresies—Arian, (partially) Audianist, Henrican, etc.—and his ear, however perfect, tuned to a pitch that no versifier of the 18th century was able to hit, to the detriment of everyone who followed him. What’s more, he was a thoroughly dour and nasty character with, as Johnson put it in his deliciously venomous Life, a "Turkish contempt of females." I swore him off and went years without so much as opening my old Merritt Hughes edition of the Selected Works.
While I maintain that he was a vicious and arrogant man with an astonishing capacity for self-absorption even in the face of things like the death of friends and relations—compare Lycidas, which is really a poem about water, with Johnson’s elegy for Dr. Levitt—I find that my heart has warmed to him again. In fact, if I were forced to choose which to take with me for a stint in solitary confinement between a coffee-stained print-out of "On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity" full of typographical errors and the complete works of, say, Marvell in an impeccably edited modern scholarly edition, I would pick the former without hesitation for these lines alone:
Smoothly the waters kist,
Whispering new joyes to the milde Ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While Birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.
How did this happen? The answer, I think, is that I have learned to read Milton as if he were someone else.
This is not hard to do. The first step is to read A.N. Wilson’s short revisionist biography from 1983. This delightful little book—it even ends with a joke—spares no expense in rehabilitating its subject’s character: every bizarre habit, each offense against decency and good taste is excused or explained away. When evidence fails him, Wilson retreats to the high ground of euphony and shoots down wave after wave of objection by reminding us of the sheer loveliness of nearly every line Milton produced. His book is also theologically serious in a way that makes it easy to dispel permanently the tradition in Milton studies, formal and otherwise, of what I have come to think of as "the Satan Bros."
It is impossible to take seriously the adolescent reading of Milton’s Satan—endorsed by everyone from Blake to Empson to Christopher Hitchens—as someone who deserves our admiration. He is an entirely ridiculous figure. His special pleading begins in the third stanza of Paradise Lost—"till then who knew / The force of those dire Arms?"—and continues unabated for the duration of the first infernal council. It is easy to fist-pump along with him as he rants about the necessity of "unconquerable Will" and "courage never to submit or yield" so long as you’re not paying attention. (This is the point of the famous S-A-T-A-N acrostic in Book IX.) Not only is Satan silly, he is also banal and, literally speaking, a creeper. I can’t see how Shelley’s version of Lucifer as a kind of suave Byronic seducer survives the beginning of Book IV where the angels find him "Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve," who is asleep.
Milton is our greatest poet of nature. Too often we associate him with stock classical imagery, the hulking bodies of the fallen angels "Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks In Vallombrosa," rather than with "Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme, / Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde" or "the mantling vine" that "Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps / Luxuriant." Logan Pearsall Smith, in his wonderful, eccentric appreciation of Milton contra the Leavisites, called him "the golden alchemist of our language" and singled out this passage:
Thus talking hand in hand alone they pass’d
On to thir blissful Bower; it was a place
Chos’n by the sovran Planter, when he fram’d
All things to mans delightful use; the roofe
Of thickest covert was inwoven shade
Laurel and Mirtle, and what higher grew
Of firm and fragrant leaf; on either side
Acanthus, and each odorous bushie shrub
Fenc’d up the verdant wall; each beauteous flour,
Iris all hues, Roses, and Gessamin
Rear’d high thir flourisht heads between, and wrought
Mosaic; underfoot the Violet,
Crocus, and Hyacinth with rich inlay
Broiderd the ground, more colour’d then with stone
Of costliest Emblem: other Creature here
Beast, Bird, Insect, or Worm durst enter none;
Such was thir awe of Man. In shadie Bower
More sacred and sequesterd, though but feignd,
Pan or Silvanus never slept, nor Nymph,
Nor Faunus haunted.
One could go on indefinitely in this de-familiarizing vein. The sheer strangeness of Paradise Lost cannot be overstated. How many people before Regina Schwartz have ever bothered to point out that, in Adam and Eve’s meal with Raphael, we see prior to the Incarnation—never mind the Last Supper—the Eucharist celebrated outdoors by a female priest, like one of those "camping Masses" that still go on under the jurisdiction of the less savory Dutch bishops?
Then there are the absurd quasi-Olympic games and obstacle courses that divert the fallen angels while their boss is busy investigating creation, the auto-erotic birth that gives way to father-daughter and son-mother incest and doubles as a kind of gruesome parody of the Trinity, the curiously tender amount of attention paid by Milton to hand-holding, the detailed response to Adam’s cringe worthy inquiry about the nature of angelic copulation, the "devilish Engines" fashioned by Satan for the war in heaven: are these guns, then? This is weird and weirdly compelling stuff.
The new Penguin hardback of Paradise Lost is a beautiful object. Coralie Bickford-Smith, who designed the boards, is doing the most striking work in the business. The introduction and notes from John Leonard, the author of a marvelous two-volume study of the poem’s reception who first prepared this text for Penguin in 1999, are first rate. Leonard’s edition has many incidentally attractive features, not least the placement of asterisks in the notes in front of words coined by Milton ("Pandemonium," "terrific," "self-knowing," "effulgence") and a brisk unfussiness about moving between the texts of 1667 and 1674 when deciding where to use punctuation (which, after all, befits a poet who could not see it). It won’t replace anyone’s Riverside Milton or the relevant volume from the eccentric but essential Yale edition of the Works; nor is it meant to. It is strictly for the fans, among whom I once again count myself.