PARADISE LOST

An epic poem’s backstory.

Derided for generations as a long-winded misogynist, an apologist for regicide, and a tedious know-it-all, John Milton is appreciated now as the most influential writer after William Shakespeare. His resonant lines inspired everyone from John Keats and William Blake to Philip Pullman. His fascination with pre- and post-fallen sex has generated feminist responses from Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft to 21st-century academics. Milton led a political and religious life that makes us wonder what the place of knowledge and belief may be in the machinations of power. Jacobs has written much about the place of Christian humanism in modern society. Here, he offers a biography of Paradise Lost, not from its origin but through its afterlife—how it was viewed by and shaped English writers and critics. We don’t get much about the intricacies of Puritan faith and politics. We don’t get much about Milton’s plans to write a tragedy and then move to an epic. What we get is a clear summary of the poem, calling attention to important passages about God’s foreknowledge and human free will, woman’s subordination to man, and the temptations of language. The real takeaway is this: Milton becomes “the pretext for arguments about the ongoing validity of Christian belief…a battlefield on which a kind of proxy war is fought…[between] the massed opposing armies of the Believers and the Unbelievers. The War in Heaven is recapitulated as a War in Academic Publishing.” Undergraduates coming to the poem for the first time will find this book an alluring invitation to take a bite. Academic warriors may find it less a call to battle than a laying down of arms.

A concise summary of Paradise Lost as a work of theological and social inquiry, together with its literary impact.