Chapter Themes of Paradise Lost - Study Guide by John Milton

"The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin, rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame meter…

Not without cause, therefore, some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies…

This neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect… rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the modern bondage of rhyming."

(Preface to Paradise Lost)

Milton was ‘modern’ in his diction and accidence. The poem revolves around a labyrinth of powerful parallels and contrasts: God and Satan, good and evil, love and hate, humility and pride, reason and passion, liberty and servitude, order and anarchy, natural simplicity and artificial luxury. The language and style of the poem are unique in the history of English poetry in its combined simplicity and sublimity. The epic genre required the poet’s style raise the attention of the reader above the everyday to the contemplative. For obvious reasons, it is the language and imagery of the Bible that echoes most through the poem. Milton took suggestions for the way of raising his text from Hebrew, Greek and Latin poetry, and the modern Italians. In Milton’s oeuvre, progressively from Lycidas and a number of the sonnets to the prose tracts, we can see the emergence of Milton’s methods – compressed and elliptical syntax, playing with normal word order, the periodic sentence, long and complex sentences, new and ambiguous use of words.

Critics from Addison and Johnson, unjustly, complained the English of Paradise Lost is almost foreign; a reading of the text will establish that the charge Milton was dominated by a distinctively un-English and Latinate diction is unfounded. Where necessary for theological discussion, for example in the invocation to light (III.1-55), Milton is Latinate. However the main part of the passage is English.

Milton was bold in his rhythm as much as his style. As the poet declared in his introduction, the use of blank verse in a long poem was unprecedented in English poetry. Milton exploited the possibilities of expressive rhythm that arose either from the material or his own creativity. Ricks responded to critics of Milton’s style:

"That his [Milton's] style astonishes is itself some cause of surprise. The epic is of all literary kind the most dignified, the most concerned to fulfil expectation rather than to baffle or ignore it. . . . [He] must combine two fervours: a heroic dedication to tradition; and a heroic dedication to himself, a confidence in his own greatness which will prevent his suffocating under the weight of a great tradition. "

Surely it was necessary for Milton to approach his work with a great sense of decorum, both out of respect for its epic tradition and our of respect for its grand subject.

In addition to the epic characteristics of Paradise Lost, epic conventions are also discernible. Milton begins by stating his theme: the entire story of salvation is summarized in the opening twenty-six lines, and the purpose of the epic, to "justify the ways of God to men," is stated in line twenty-six. Milton also opens his narrative in medias res, beginning by asking how Adam and Eve could have fallen. Who could have caused it? We then meet an already fallen Satan; it is only in Book VI that the War in Heaven is actually described.