Epics and history

Of all the great literary works produced during the Interregnum and the Restoration, Paradise Lost - unquestionably the greatest work of literature in the entire century - is the hardest for us to understand as a product of its political and religious context. This is in part because of its very greatness: after its first printed publication in 1667, Milton's epic quickly became the most imitated poem in the English language, and this remained the case until the end of the nineteenth century. That Milton's subject was ostensibly Biblical and hence 'timeless', especially with regard to the local events of mid seventeenth-century England, helped to form a dominant view that the poet gave up politics with the return of the monarchy, and the failure of Puritan and Republican experiments. Through its popularity, Paradise Lost slipped the lease that initially shackled it to history.

The degree to which Milton became a quietist after 1660 is now a matter of dispute among critics, as much as they also debate the extent to which Paradise Lost was complete before the same date. What is beyond dispute, however, is that no contemporary of Milton’s would have read the poem as unrelated to the events of its own time. This is not least because heroic verse – verse written, like Paradise Lost, in conscious and artful imitation of the tradition that stemmed from the ancient epicists of Greece and Rome – was widely understood to address public issues.