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QA CriticalNotes
JOHN MILTON (1608-1674)
Paper Outline:
(A) Contradiction between Milton the Puritan, and Milton the republican or
bourgeois revolutionist, and Milton the Renaissance humanist
(B) The writer as a staunch fighter for freedom and against tyranny
(C) Miltonic blank verse Characteristics

From I638 to 1639, he travelled through France to Italy, spending sixteen months in Florence,
Rome, Naples and other Italian Cities and meeting a number of prominent figures there
(including Galileo in prison) and writing some Latin and Italian verses
...
From Italy he planned to make an extended trip
eastward to Greece and the Palestine, but the political developments in England at the time
made him decide to cut short his journey and return
...
”
He started making orations against tyranny and scholasticism and writing some Latin verses
and also a few English poems (including chiefly the ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" and
the sonnet "On Shakespeare")
...

The earliest of his five anti-episcopal pamphlets, "Of Reformation", appeared in 1641, and the
other four followed in rapid succession from 1641 to 1642
...

Comus, the theme here, a typical one for the Puritan poet, is that of the power of virtue and
purity to subdue the forces of evil, but this poetic drama contains also a definitely political
meaning, for Comus in a way represents the wild life of drunkenness and immorality at the
court of Charles I and his Cavaliers, and the lady stands for virtue and purity while the
Attendant Spirit and Sabina symbolize help from God who protects the good and the virtuous
...
However, "Comus" was first of all

an occasional piece, meant to serve as a lavish theatrical performance of Ludlow Castle to
celebrate the reunion the Egerton family, and to give the youthful poet an opportunity display
his richness of imagery and lyricism of language in the tradition of Spenser and Sidney
...

Comus, a pagan god and son of Bacchus and Circe, way lays travellers and tempts them to
drink a magic liquor which changes their countenances into the faces of wild beasts
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Separated from her brothers, she is attracted by
the sound of revelry and comes to the merry-making of Comus and his wild, drunken followers
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Her brothers, looking for her, are told of what has happened to the lady, by the good
Attendant Spirit who takes the form of the shepherd Thyrsis
...
Here the scene
changes and Comus, with the group of his wild followers around him, urges the lady to drink
from a glass, but she, a symbol of virtue and purity, resists his enticements
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Thyrsis then calls upon Sabina, goddess of the neighbouring river
Severn, who comes with her water-nymphs and frees the lady
...

"Lycidas", the last of the shorter poems of Milton's youth, was an elegy written upon the
occasion of the death of Edward King, who got drowned in a shipwreck, on his way to Ireland in
1637
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The traditional form of pastoral verse is used, and the whole elegy is a lengthy speech of a
shepherd wailing the death of another
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Finally, there is a brief description of the shepherd who has sung the whole song above
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First, here again, as in the twin poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso", we find the youthful
poet's inner contradictions between a solemn life of studies and poetry (such as his Puritan faith
prompts him) and a gay life of physical pleasures (such as was the common practice of well- todo people around him), expressed in the allegorical language of poetry:
"Alas! what boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely, slighted, Shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done, as others use,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?"

And the answer is, for Milton, to pursue his poetic career, with Fame as the final object:
"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights and live laborious days
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More important is the satire in the poem on the worldly clergy of the Anglican Church, uttered
via the mouth of St
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Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least
That to the faithful Herdman's art belongs!"
Here we find Milton as a Puritan attacking the Anglican clergymen who grew rich and led a
life of luxury instead of attending to their clerical duties toward the common folk, and in this
way this poem anticipated the poet's religious pamphlets to be written in the following years
against the Anglican bishops and the Anglican Church
...

These pamphlets all had to do with the hot religious controversy then going on between the
bishops of the Anglican Church and their supporters on the one side and the Puritan (chiefly
Presbyterian) preachers and their sympathizers on the other, and the question at issue was the
abolition of bishops
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Although these religious tracts of Milton's were, except for the first one, counter-blows at the
pamphlets of his opponents in the controversy and therefore involved personal attacks or at
least exposed the corruption of Anglican bishops, the author was actually arguing on purely
philosophical grounds, quoting from the Bible and other religious authorities and maintaining
above all things the need for greater freedom in religious worship and against the tyrannous
interference of the bishops
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So in "Of Prelatical Episcopacy", Milton wrote: "No man who knows aught can be so stupid to
deny that all men naturally were born free", and that kings and magistrates are "deputies and
commissioners of the people
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Here again we find Milton fighting for fuller religious freedom in every respect, and these
pamphlets also had their political significance because they were written at a time during the
Protectorate when the government was trying to interfere more in religious matters and to
devise all sorts of taxes to support the clergy
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Chiefly after the Restoration in
1660, in the last dozen years or so of his life, he wrote his three major poetical works, the two
epics "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" and a tragedy in verse, "Samson Agonistes", all of
which on the one hand employed subjects taken from the Christian Bible and on the other
continued to show the writer as a staunch fighter for freedom and against tyranny
...

"Paradise Lost" (published in 1667) has generally been considered Milton's most important
poem, while "Samson Agonistes" shows most intimately the poet's personal feelings of his last
years
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From his early days Milton always wished to write long and dignified epic poems, and for a
time he thought of employing the story of King Arthur as the subject for his epic
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The central theme of "Paradise Lost" is taken from the Bible and deals with the Christian story
of "the fall of man", that is, how the first man and woman in the world, Adam and Eve, were
tempted by Satan to disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge,
and how they were consequently punished by God and driven out of paradise, with the prospect
nevertheless of the eventual redemption of mankind by Jesus Christ the Son of God
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The essentially religious nature of the poem
comes naturally from Milton's fervent belief in Christianity as a Puritan, but this belief is itself
a revolt against the established doctrines of the Catholics and of the Anglican Church as he
insisted on the freedom of each individual to interpret the Bible for himself
...

And here we see in the poem Milton's inner contradiction, between Milton the Puritan and
Milton the republican or bourgeois revolutionist, for in the former capacity the poet was or
should be wholly on the side of God but because of his revolutionary sympathies he showed
himself frequently uttering his own fiery words of rebellion against tyranny through the
speeches of Satan and his adherents
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So it has sometimes been claimed that in this contradiction between the poet's
Puritanism and his republicanism which arises in the peculiar situation of Satan defending
himself as a rebel against the authority who happens to be God, Milton the bourgeois
revolutionist triumphs for the moment over Milton the devout Christian, and quite
unintentionally or even against his original intentions he allows the devil to call upon his
comrades to resist tyranny and fight for freedom
...

So the contradiction between Milton the Puritan and Milton the republican or bourgeois
revolutionist exists only in appearance, while in essence Milton's sympathy and approval are

directed specifically to the thoughts and sentiments of fighting for freedom and against tyranny
rather than to the persons who utter those thoughts and sentiments
...

Whatever be the proper explanations for this seeming or obvious contradiction in the mind of
the Puritan-Republican, the common applause of Miltonic scholars and critics has usually been
showered upon Satan's speeches that call for the rebels' fight for freedom and declare their
resistance to tyranny in Books I and II of "Paradise Lost", chiefly because the great
revolutionist poet remained as staunch and unshaken a fighter against tyranny under the
reactionary regime of the Restoration as he had been during his pamphleteering career in the
years of the Commonwealth
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While the earlier books of the epic seem to show the contradiction between Milton the
Puritan and Milton the republican or bourgeois revolutionist, the later portions of the poem,
particularly those parts dealing with Adam and Eve, reveal quite distinctly the contradiction
between Milton the Puritan and Milton the belated Renaissance humanist
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The love between Adam and Eve is described with great
vividness and force, as the poet reveals their strong physical passions and their complete
spiritual unions in the true spirit of Renaissance humanism
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Here the Renaissance "joie
de vivre" takes precedence over the asceticism of the Puritans
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In Books IV, V, VII and IX, again and again we come across the question of why
God should forbid the Tree of Knowledge which very naturally seems to be beneficial to man
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The chief characteristic of this blank verse used here is the long and involved
and sometimes seemingly interminable sentence construction, so that a passage frequently goes
on and on through ten or twenty or even more lines of verse, and the meaning of the whole
thing is suspended and not completed, while clause after clause, phrase after phrase, are added
to enrich the complexity of thought or to increase the effect of the description, till the end of
the sentence comes with the period, and only then does the reader grasp the full significance of
the entire utterance
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Yet another characteristic of the blank verse here is the
extreme variety of pauses: as in Shakespeare's great tragedies, so in this epic of Milton's the
caesura may come almost anywhere in a line of verse, thus breaking the monotony of the pause
falling inevitably at the close of a line
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"Paradise Regained", written after "Paradise Lost", is in title and story apparently a
continuation of the earlier epic, for the redemption of man by Christ, predicted in the other
masterpiece, is here fulfilled, as the loss of paradise given in the Old Testament part of the
Christian Bible is followed by the regaining of it based upon the New Testament
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Here there is just one central action: how Christ in the forty days in the wilderness But the
Agonistes" and "Comus") but occasionally in conflict with each other (as in "Paradise Lost")
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Milton wrote many different types of poetry, from sonnets and lyrics and pastoral elegies and
masques of his early and middle periods to epics and verse tragedies of his old age, and
distinguished himself in almost all of them
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Milton's prose served in a more direct way his fight against tyranny in the actual political
struggle of his day, and many of his pamphlets, especially such pieces as "Areopagitica", "Of the
Tenure of Kings and

Magistrates" and "The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth", should be ranked
among the greatest specimens of English prose, and it is a great loss to the reading public of
English literature that "The Defence of the English People" and "The Second Defence" were written
originally in Latin
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Milton as a writer towered as a poet and as a prose writer above all the other English writers of
his time both in his revolutionary and humanist views and in his artistic achievement

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