Joe Moshenska on Milton and Paradise Lost
"He’s an interesting case study of how a single person can combine staggering amounts of open-mindedness ... with very clear lines they won’t cross."
Paradise Lost is widely considered to be the greatest epic in the English language. Yet its creator, John Milton, remains a complicated and controversial figure, representing both enormous empathy and puritanical intolerance. A few days ago, I spoke to Oxford’s Joe Moshenska, one of the world’s leading Milton experts and the author of Making Darkness Light—an intensely personal biography of the poet—about Milton’s many conflicting sides. We also discussed Milton’s eventful life during the English Civil War, the timeless appeal of his magnum opus, and his impact on politics, education, and free speech. As you’ll see below, Paradise Lost remains as absorbing today as the day it was published. And no wonder; Milton is a writer who never grows stale.
Octavian Review: Why did you choose Milton, and why did you write a book about him now?
Joe Moshenska: When you work on a towering, canonical figure, you don’t often stop to justify it to yourself or to other people; there’s a feeling that the greatness speaks for itself. At the same time, there are now lots of questions flying around about why we should care about literature at all, and about these particular people at the heart of the canon. A few years ago, I started asking myself those questions, out of a combination of pandemic induced self-reflection and having hit the stage in life that me think, “Well, how did I end up spending all the time teaching and reading and thinking about this long-dead writer with whom I actually have a very ambivalent relationship?”
I’m really interested in the ambivalent relationships we form with these great figures. There’s often a feeling that you either have to defend them or be against them. But my relationship with Milton has been a lot more complicated than that. He presents a lot of personal and intellectual problems; he was a complicated person, and his work has inspired a range of violently opposed opinions.
OR: You have a great line in the book where you write that he’s more a national monument than a national treasure. If you had to sum up the conflicting Miltons, where is the tension?
Moshenska: The tension that interests me the most has to do with human agency and the feeling that on the one hand, Milton has the most powerful sense of his own forceful individuality and the ability of his work to change the world, and on the other hand, his feeling that he’s nothing more than a vessel for words and inspirations that come from elsewhere and that work through him. Part of him is intensely active and directive, and another side of him is all about relinquishing control, allowing things to happen through him. I think you need both of those impulses to write great literature.
OR: What outside influences had the most powerful effect on Milton?
Moshenska: It’s worth reminding ourselves that when Milton was born, English was not a internationally respected literary language. So to be an educated person meant to speak and think and operate in Latin. Milton studied ancient languages at school and university. He was an amazing linguist and seemed to pick up languages effortlessly. He had an omnivorous mind and a porousness, an ability to absorb what was going on around him.
When he was young, the English education system was almost designed to create these fascinating split people. You had Latin, the language that was often literally beaten into you by your schoolmasters. And then you had English, the language of home and things going on around you. That setup seems tailor-made to produce internal divisions and conflicts and tensions in terms of how best to express yourself.
After university, Milton didn’t know what to do with his life. His parents allowed him to live off them without a job, and he just read avidly for years, in an amazing course of private study. Then, toward the end of that time, his mother died, and he wrote his great early masterpiece, Lycidas. Then he went to the Continent for two years and traveled around Italy. He befriended all these Florentine Catholics. He probably met Galileo. He spent time in Naples, befriended Caravaggio’s patron, and so on. In other words, he put himself in worlds where according to the insular, nationalist, Puritan English narrative then holding for people like him, he shouldn’t have been. This too produced splits and divisions within him.
OR: One debate we’re having today is between an education that teaches you specific things and one that teaches you how to think. In your discussion of Milton, you seem to be arguing that you need both.
Moshenska: One of the reasons I wanted to write about Milton at school is because of these debates; they tend to focus so much on content that we don’t talk much about process. One thing that’s really interesting about Milton’s era is that there were lots of debates about whether you should teach pre-Christian Pagan writers. But there were also debates about process, about how to show that you’re learning and that you’re learning in the right way. There was a lot of rote learning and repetition, but students were also taught to read a text and rewrite it in a different way or in a different voice. The classroom was very theatrical.
The other thing I’d say is that, if you want to read Milton, there are some things that you will need to know in order to fully appreciate him. Yet I’m reminded here of a line a former teacher of mine used about the poet and critic John Hollander. He said, “Hollander appeals to two kinds of readers: those who know everything and those who know nothing.” I thought that was a nice way of describing the space within a body of writing for people with different preexisting amounts of knowledge.
In Book Two of Paradise Lost, the catalog of fallen angels derives very much from the model of the great epic catalogs, such as the list of ships in The Iliad. When I first studied the poem, I didn’t have the knowledge to get why he was using this particular set of names. But just on the level of sound, there was something incredibly vivid and exciting about them that I got a lot out of.
OR: How did Milton pick the Fall of Man as the topic for his epic?
Moshenska: He thought about it for a long time. He had this moment when he was around 30, when he first started thinking that he was going to try to be the great English poet of his day and should write an epic. He then played around with the idea in lots of different ways. At one point, he thought about writing an epic about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Then he started playing around with different Bible stories for a drama. He considered a play on the Fall of Man, which would’ve been a very strange drama with a chorus and the personifications of sins and that kind of thing.
At one point, in the middle of a page of notes, he wrote down the words “Paradise Lost”—and this was 30 years before the poem was actually published. So, it was very much knocking around his mind, along with a lot of other things. But the question of how and why he came back to it is a really uncertain one. Because more than that of any other poet I can think of, Milton’s career is interestingly uneven. He had this burst of creativity in the 1630s. Then, when he came back from his travels and the civil war began, he decided he had to use his pen in the service of the public good. And he almost stopped writing poetry for a number of years, so that he could become a civil servant and devote himself to writing a very polemical kind of prose for the Cromwell government. So it’s unclear to me whether we can think of the poem as having a 30-year gestation or whether he thought about it then moved away from it.
His other texts are fascinating to look at to see where his thoughts were developing—especially the Areopagitica, which is his famous defense of the freedom of the press and still cited as one of the great writings against censorship. There’s a great passage in there where he writes about the nature of human freedom, specifically in relation to the Fall of Adam and Eve, and makes this thundering claim that we have to have freedom of choice, to actually encounter vice, in order to overcome it and seek virtue. That’s where we see the story of the Fall becoming really wired into his way of thinking about human individuality, human choice, these things that become absolutely integral to him. But it probably took him another 15 years to actually write the poem.
OR: His belief in free speech seems to come from the idea that it’s important for people to be exposed to bad thoughts in order to then purify themselves. Was that typical of the Puritan thinking at the time?
Moshenska: There were other people who shared that view. The Areopagitica was translated into French during the French Revolution, and it was loved by a lot of the American Founding Fathers. But you always feel with Milton that he’s vacillating between a side of him that wants us to be open to anybody and a side of him that really thinks there’s him and maybe three other sufficiently learned and virtuous men in the whole kingdom who could get away with it.
OR: And there’s a bit of cancel culture in the way he doesn’t want to give a voice to Catholics.
Moshenska: He’s an interesting case study of how a single person can combine staggering amounts of open-mindedness in the context of their time with very clear lines they won’t cross. He had a lifelong loathing of Catholics, which was bizarre given that he was friends with a bunch Catholic people with whom he maintained correspondences throughout his period in Italy. Yet he thought that Catholics had outsourced their freedom of choice to the Pope. So he was open to a proliferation of opinions, but it all basically had to happen within Protestantism.
OR: He’s also interesting because of the way he led a life of the mind but was also very much immersed in politics.
Moshenska: Absolutely. He became a very public figure and notorious across Europe for defending the execution of King Charles. Actually, the first thing that got him publicly vilified was his defense of divorce on the basis of incompatibility alone. His idea that people shouldn’t be married to one another if they didn’t want to be was explosive at the time. That was partly because the bond between husband and wife was seen as a model for the bond between the subject and the king, so if you start to erode one, the whole social system threatens to come crashing down. It’s a reminder that the relationship between the political and the personal in this period was quite different from ours and quite unstable.
OR: Returning to Paradise Lost, do you think Satan is the main character of the poem?
Moshenska: I think the answer changes as the poem goes on. The poem begins with Satan, who has this amazing charisma, and readers have long been divided over whether we’re supposed to sympathize with him, and whether Milton did, or not. The other candidates for the hero are Adam and the Son of God. (I say “the Son of God,” not “Jesus” or “Christ,” because that’s what Milton, who had very complicated theories on the issue, calls him in Paradise Lost.) Here again—and it’s very characteristic of him—Milton is trying to give us a choice. However established something is, we still have to find a way of making it our own. That said, I think we probably are supposed to be educated out of our idea that Satan is the hero, but I’m among those readers who think we never quite leave that behind. Satan is the one who lingers with us long after we’ve finished reading.
OR: What do you make of the moment when Satan talks about how he can’t accept the fact that he’s created by God, and about the burden of gratitude? Do you think this concept of ingratitude is the heart of the poem?
Moshenska: I do think that’s at the core of it. One of the reasons Satan is so powerful is because he inherits some of these profound Miltonic dilemmas. There are two ways of thinking about gratitude in the poem. One is very direct, aimed toward a person you take as being responsible for your salvation. The other involves the nature of Milton’s God, who is this very austere deity. He’s an angry figure who needs to be appeased, to whom gratitude needs to be expressed in all these forms. One word he spits out when he’s talking about the first humans is “ingrate”—as if that’s the worst thing you can be.
The reason I think the question of gratitude cuts to the heart of Milton’s own psychological and creative makeup goes back to what I was saying before: that if you see yourself as a powerful individual creator, you’re not dependent on anyone, you are the one with all the agency. On the other hand, you’re always fashioning or trying to shape something out of things that have come from beyond you. That’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in how Paradise Lost was composed, this idea of Milton receiving it in his sleep from his muse. I think part of what makes that notion psychologically compelling to him is that it captures that dynamic: on the one hand, it’s something he’s doing; on the other hand, it’s something that he’s receiving. I think Milton struggles with gratitude the way Satan does. It’s about the challenge of accepting yourself as anything other than the awesome individual that you feel yourself to be.
OR: Why did Milton decide to write an epic, and where does Paradise Lost fit in the arc of the great epics?
Moshenska: By Milton’s time, the epic tradition meant quite a number of things. Milton had incredible encyclopedic ambitions: he wanted Paradise Lost to be the book to end all books, and to contain everything. So he had to make himself heir to all of the different strands of the epic tradition. He had The Iliad, which is a poem of war and battle and struggle. He had The Odyssey, which is an epic of wandering and homecoming. He had The Aeneid, which combines those two. Then in the Roman imperial era, there was an interesting proliferation of poems that call themselves epics. And then you have another version, which says epic is the poem that gives you truth about reality. Milton’s wrestling with all that; he wants to purify and refine and perfect the tradition, but he also wants to encompass everything. So we get the war in Heaven, which is him doing his mini-Iliad, and we get Satan’s wanderings across chaos, which is him doing his version of the Odyssey. But the whole thing is predicated, like the work of Lucretius, on the idea that you can write a poem that is not just clever or engaging, but a true account of the way things are.
OR: What is the relationship between Milton and Shakespeare? Why is Shakespeare so beloved and Milton’s reception so complicated?
Moshenska: Shakespeare is a fascinating thread through Milton’s life. He’s there in a lot of Milton’s early poems. He also pops up in more surprising places. There’s a wonderful moment in Paradise Lost when Satan, before settling on a snake, is changing shape between different animals while moving through Eden. And there’s a clear allusion to Shakespeare’s Puck dancing through the forest.
What people admire about Shakespeare is his ability to dissolve himself into his characters. It’s incredibly difficult to say Shakespeare thought X about Y. He didn’t really experience the same internal dilemma between these modes of self-assertion and self-erasure that Milton experienced. Shakespeare was able to be indebted, to be receptive, without feeling the need to insert himself. Whereas Milton could not stop telling us what he thought and what he wanted us to think. Yet that’s constantly being complicated by a set of countervailing impulses. So half of Milton identifies with Shakespeare intensely, and the other half doesn’t know what to do with him. That’s why you can have these moments where you feel there is a fundamental affinity between them, and others where you think there couldn’t be two more different writers in English history.
OR: Why should somebody take the time to read Paradise Lost today?
Moshenska: There are two stories about why we read at all and why we read great literature. One is a story about identifying with situations that we find ourselves in or want to encounter. Thoughts we’ve had, people we’ve been, things we’ve felt. The other story is that we read things to be taken outside ourselves, to be uncomfortable, to be in the unfamiliar. They’re both true, and Paradise Lost gives us both of those things to an extreme. It gives us the utmost opportunity to relate, engage, find and be found—and, on the other hand, it gives us foreignness, strangeness, weirdness. I don’t know of any other work where those reasons for reading are purified and intensified so much and then made to exist within the same space. For me, there’s nothing else like it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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