Paradise Lost

By the time John Milton began composing Paradise Lost in earnest in the early 1660s, he had been completely blind for roughly a decade, most historians tracing the total loss of his sight to 1652. He wrote nothing of the poem's more than ten thousand lines by hand. Instead he composed passages in his head, often at night or in the early morning, and dictated them the following day to whichever amanuensis was available: his nephews, paid assistants, and, by his own account and that of early biographers, his daughters Mary and Deborah, who are traditionally said to have taken dictation and read aloud to him from books in languages, Milton having taught them to sound out Latin, Greek and Hebrew phonetically, that he understood but they reportedly did not.

The practical difficulty of the method shaped the poem's own account of its making. In the invocation that opens Book Seven, Milton describes his Muse, Urania, visiting him nightly and dictating to him "slumbering," a line read for centuries as literal description as much as literary convention, given how the poem was actually produced. He sold the manuscript's copyright in 1667 for an initial payment of five pounds, with further payments contingent on print runs selling out, a modest sum even by the standards of the day for a work he had spent years composing entirely from memory and dictation, blind, in a country that had recently imprisoned him for his politics and briefly threatened his life at the Restoration.

No character in Paradise Lost has generated more disagreement than its Satan, who dominates the poem's opening books with speeches of defiant grandeur before Milton's narrative gradually strips him down to a physically diminished, increasingly pathetic figure by the poem's later books. The gap between Satan's early rhetorical power, declaring it "better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven," and his eventual degradation is the whole of the critical argument in miniature.

By the Romantic era, poets including William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley had begun reading Satan as the poem's real hero, a rebel against arbitrary authority whose energy Milton's own sympathies betrayed even as his stated theology condemned him. Blake's often quoted remark, that Milton wrote of Satan and Hell "at liberty" and of God and Heaven "in fetters" because he was "a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it," became the anchor of what later critics called the Satanist or Romantic reading.

C. S. Lewis's 1942 study A Preface to Paradise Lost mounted the fullest scholarly counterargument, insisting the poem is a deliberate epic in the classical mold and that Milton's own theology, an orthodox seventeenth century Christian's view of pride as the root sin, condemns Satan consistently from the first line to the last: any reader's early attraction to him is the poem doing exactly what a portrait of temptation is supposed to do. Neither reading has fully displaced the other, and the disagreement remains a standard entry point into how Milton scholarship as a whole is taught.