Study Guide to Paradise Lost and Other Works by John Milton

Intelligent Education

• Éditeur: Influence Publishers
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422778
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Study Aids
• Sous-sujet: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by John Milton, who decided at a young age that God had called him to be a poet. Titles in this study guide include Paradise Lost, The Sonnets, and Minor Poems: On The Morning of Christ's Nativity, L'Allegro, And Il Penseroso. As a body of work of the sventeenth-century, Milton's writing made use of popular Renaissance conventions in his day, such as the style of poetry called an epic. Moreover, his work's style and mannerisms mimicked the grammatical structure of Latin, and gave it a more complex and classic sound. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Milton's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO JOHN MILTON

 

To the student brought up on romantic theories of poets and poetry, the biography of John Milton, like that of the other two greatest poets of the English language - Chaucer and Shakespeare, must be disappointing. For all three men lived lives too ordinary to seem suitable for poets. Chaucer earned his living most of his life as a civil servant, for a while as a customs clerk. Shakespeare retired from his profitable career as a playwright to live out his life peacefully in Stratford and willed his wife his second-best bed. And Milton, in some ways, departs even farther from the picture we cherish of the poet: the man tormented by conflicting passions who cannot live in a world too insensitive to understand him. Not only did Milton never become a beatnik; he never even had any reason to. If he was not a rebel in our sense of the term, however, he was, nonetheless, a man of stern integrity and firm independence.

MILTON’S BACKGROUND

John Milton was born in 1608 into a Puritan family. His father after whom he was named, was a scrivener, a recorder of property deeds and titles. The family was highly cultured, for Mr. Milton was a fine musician, a composer who attained some recognition among his contemporaries. He was evidently aware of his son’s exceptional gifts and provided him not only with an excellent education but also with sympathetic understanding.

Milton attended St. Paul’s School in London, one of the best secondary schools of the day. He received additional instruction from a tutor at home, a young dissenting clergyman named Thomas Young, who became one of Milton’s good friends. Milton concentrated on Latin and Greek and was taught Hebrew as well. He managed also to learn Italian very well, though no modern languages were taught either at St. Paul’s or at Cambridge, which he entered in 1625.

He enrolled in Christ’s Church College at that University and became one of its distinguished students, even though he was “rusticated” or suspended for a time because of a sharp disagreement with his tutor, William Chappell. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1629, the same year in which he wrote his first really famous English poem, a Christmas ode entitled “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” It is probable, also, that during his later years at Cambridge he wrote L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. These companion poems - “The Cheerful Man” and “The Pensive Man” - are probably the first works of Milton that the American student reads. They contrast two ways of life or, perhaps, two moods. The first celebrates the light-heartedness which seeks innocent pleasure. The second describes the more serious pursuits of the thoughtful man.

MILTON’S VOCATION

In 1632, Milton completed his M.A. and went to live at Horton, his family’s country retreat. He remained there for six years, pursuing a diligent course of reading and writing in order to prepare himself to be a great poet. Milton had decided when he was very young that poetry was the vocation to which he was called. And to the devout son of religious parents, one was called to his vocation, whatever it might be, by God.

In 1638, Milton left Horton to make the “grand tour,” the step which was to complete his elaborate preparation for his career. He traveled principally in France and in Italy. The tour was cut short by rumors of civil war in England. Milton returned to England in 1639, the date of the First Bishop’s War and the beginning of the Puritan Revolution.

During all these years Milton had been supported by his understanding and indulgent father. But upon his return from the Continent, both father and son seemed to think that it would be a good idea if the younger John began to earn his own living. He established himself in London as a schoolmaster, with his nephews, John and Edward Phillips, as his first two pupils.

Milton soon became involved in the religious debates of the day. His inclination was toward the Puritan party. The Puritans found the Church of England too broad and too Catholic in using a rich liturgy and vestments. They wished to purify the church from within on the basis of scriptural principles and to do away with bishops and the support of the church by the state. As a Puritan, Milton was opposed to church government by bishops and wrote several pamphlets advocating the abolition of the episcopacy.

MILTON’S MARRIAGES

During the 1630s there was a power struggle between King Charles and his Parliament. After the Long Parliament of 1640, the king was deprived of some of his power, and Parliament undertook church reform along Puritan lines. In 1642 the Parliamentary party demanded control of the army, the privy councilors, and even the education of the king’s children. It is curious that Milton, a strong Puritan, in this year married Mary Powell, a member of a Royalist family whose support of the king was in opposition to Milton’s support of the Puritan and Parliamentary cause. Mary, who was younger than he was and used to a large, cheerful household, left him after a very short time to visit her family, a visit that was to continue for three years, partly because Mary wanted to stay with her family and partly because the Civil War, which began August 22, 1642, made it quite difficult for her to return to London.

She did return, though, in 1645, and the two were reconciled. She bore her husband three daughters and a son who died in infancy. She died herself in 1652 in giving birth to the third of the daughters. Milton married again in 1656, this time to Katherine Woodcock, whom he loved very much. She died, also in childbirth, less than fifteen months later, and her child lived only a month. One of Milton’s most beautiful sonnets, “On His Deceased Wife,” commemorates their brief marriage. Milton’s third and last marriage, in 1663, to Elizabeth Minshull, was very frankly a marriage of convenience. The poet, who had been blind by then for 11 years, needed someone to run his household and help rear his three occasionally rebellious daughters.

MILTON’S POLITICAL ACTIVITIES

Milton continued during the early years of the Civil War to write pamphlets on the controversial issues of the day. His first volume of poems was published in 1645. The volume is of major importance because it includes both Comus and Lycidas, two of Milton’s great works. However, the next period of Milton’s life was devoted not to the poetry he loved but to a duty he felt to be more immediately pressing: the duty of doing what he could to establish and maintain the Puritan Commonwealth.

The first phase of the Civil War had ended in 1645 with the defeat of Charles I at the Battle of Naseby. But hostilities were renewed in 1648, and in 1649, Charles I was beheaded. In that same year Milton was engaged as Latin Secretary to the Council of State of the Commonwealth, a Council which Oliver Cromwell headed. Since Latin was the language of diplomacy in the seventeenth century, his office required Milton to write whatever letters were sent to other governments. He was, besides, expected to defend the regime against its numerous enemies in print. As a consequence, he became involved in pamphlet wars which he found sometimes demeaning and always time-consuming. The greatest of his prose works was written against Cromwell’s government, rather than in its behalf, and was ignored in Milton’s day. That work is Areopagitica, Milton’s impassioned defense of freedom of the press. The reader of Paradise Lost might be interested also in De Doctrina Christiana (On the Christian Doctrine), a treatise on theology which throws some light on the intellectual background of Milton’s greatest poem.

MILTON’S BLINDNESS AND DISILLUSIONMENT

It was during his service to the Commonwealth that Milton became blind. The disability came upon him gradually, but Milton did not allow it to interfere with the heavy reading and writing that his position demanded. By 1652, however, he was totally blind, and it became necessary for others to share in his labors. His blindness occasioned one of the most moving of his sonnets, “When I Consider,” written in 1655. It records his fear that he will never be able to use his God-given gift for poetry again. Yet God may demand an accounting from him, for his entry into Heaven will depend upon how well he has used the gifts God gave him. The sonnet ends with Milton’s acceptance of the fact that what God wants of him is obedience and resignation. He can, then, serve God even if he can’t write poetry, for “they also serve who only stand and wait.”

In 1658 Cromwell died and was succeeded by his son, Richard, who was quite incapable of ruling in his father’s stead. Thus, in 1660, Charles II, of the House of Stuart, the son of Charles I, whom Cromwell had beheaded, was restored to the English throne. Milton’s life was in very real danger, and he was for a short time imprisoned. After his release he lived in disillusionment and bitterness. The Commonwealth, he had long realized, was not the Utopia for which he had worked. But in restoring the Stuarts to the throne, in no longer trying to live in a republican state, his people, he felt, had turned their backs on freedom. Milton was alienated from the most powerful elements of the society of the time also because the Stuarts and their followers stood for the institutions he had fought against most of his life: the monarchy and the episcopacy. He expresses his sense of being an exile in the beginning of Book VII of Paradise Lost, in the invocation to Urania.

This last period of his life was, nonetheless, his most creative. For it was during these years, in which he felt himself to be the prophet who had failed, the man of the Lord to whom no one listened, that he completed his greatest works: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.

INTRODUCTION TO PARADISE LOST

Paradise Lost was originally published in ten books in 1667. In its second edition, that of 1674, two of the original ten books were divided to form the twelve-book poem we know today.

Milton had intended to write an epic most of his life, for to men of the Renaissance the greatest poetic form was that of the epic. Milton had originally planned to use King Arthur as the subject of a poem that would glorify England as Virgil’s Aeneid glorified Rome. He changed his mind, however, and chose a topic of wider significance: a topic that included in its span the whole human race, since we are all children of Adam, and which glorified not a nation but God himself.

We do not know the exact date at which Milton began his greatest work, but we do know from Milton’s comments within the poem that it was written after he had become blind. Milton composed his poem in his mind in segments, having trained himself to remember them. Then he dictated these passages to a secretary.

The poem is written in blank verse-unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter (lines of five feet, each foot containing two syllables, the second of which is accented). It is a verse form which permits the narrative sweep Milton needed for his subject. The reader need not pause at the end of each line as he would have to do if the lines rhymed. Furthermore, Milton had no need to break his poem into the small units a stanzaic pattern would have required. Thus, some of the paragraphs of Paradise Lost are long and complex. Others are short and direct. Only blank verse could have given the poet so flexible a medium.

PARADISE LOST AS AN EPIC

An epic poem is a narrative poem of considerable length which tells a story of great importance. Its theme should be significant to all men, and its readers should be profoundly aware of the grandeur of its subject. In other words, an epic cannot treat of trivial matter. And its style must permit the reader to feel awe, to be caught up in the perception of events of great magnitude, of suffering that makes his own seem less worth worrying about. No reader of Paradise Lost can fail to see that Milton’s poem fulfills these requirements.

Besides modeling his poem in its general outlines upon the genre - the type of poem - he thought to be of greatest stature, Milton made use of epic conventions that men of the Renaissance considered traditional. The reader’s ability to grasp these conventions will depend upon how many epics he has read and how well he has read them. For instance, the beginning of the poem is an epic convention. Homer’s Iliad, the first great epic, begins with a request to the Muse to sing of the wrath of Achilles. Furthermore, Milton, in the beginning of his poem, states his subject - “man’s first disobedience” and the consequent loss of Paradise. Homer’s subject was the wrath of Achilles and its consequences. The Aeneid begins

Arms and the man I sing who earliest came

Fate-bound for refuge from the coasts of Troy

To Italy, . . .

(tr. by T. H. Delabere-May.)

The subject of the poem, of course, is Aeneas’ voyage to Italy and his conquest of that land after the fall of Troy.

There are other echoes of earlier epics in Milton’s poem, too. The single combats between Satan and Michael the...

Table des matières

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to John Milton
• 2) Introduction to Paradise Lost
• 3) Textual Analysis
• 4) Introduction to The Sonnets
• 5) The Sonnets: Paradise Regained
• 6) The Sonnets: Samson Agonistes
• 7) The Sonnets: Lycidas
• 8) The Sonnets: Comus
• 9) Minor Poems: On the morning of Christ's Nativity
• 10) Minor Poems: L'Allegro and Il Penseroso
• 11) Introduction to Milton's Style
• 12) Critical Commentary
• 13) Essay Questions and Answers
• 14) Bibliography and Guide to Further Research