Introduction

In November 1956, F.T. P rince gave a public lecture ‘On the Last Two Books of Paradise Lost’ at the University of Southampton. He began: ‘Paradise Lost is perhaps the only long poem in English in which every part contributes to the whole. There is no waste or loose matter: unity of design and execution is sustained from beginning to end’. In the lecture that follows, Prince makes the case for the artistic success of the final books of Paradise Lost, the culmination of Milton's poetic vision in which the Archangel Michael foretells the course of human history after the Fall. This is effectively an addendum to the most forceful modern apology for Milton's epic, itself a set of public lectures: C.S. L ewis's A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). Lewis had written to refute the attacks of various modern critics on the style and substance of the poem, and to correct the ‘misunderstanding of the species (epic narrative)’ from which these errors arose. He sets about his task by establishing Milton's literary precedents, showing the poem to be a successful union of epic decorum and Christian dogma. However, even he cannot bring himself to defend books 11 and 12, which he regretfully—and memorably—describes as ‘an untransmuted lump of futurity’. Lewis is especially careful not to resort to arguing for the doctrinal necessity of these books; Milton's crucial failure is, above all, ‘inartistic’. In an uncharacteristically sentimental moment, Lewis suggests: ‘Perhaps Milton was in ill health’. Conceding that this is ‘the most direct and sustained statement of dogma’ in the poem, Prince argues that these two books are vital to the epic as a whole. In what many modern critics have seen as a botched ending—excepting, of course, the final moments in which Adam and Eve take ‘their solitary way’ out of Eden—he finds ‘intellectual coherence, emotional depth, poetic force’. He is particularly resistant to the stubborn wrongheadedness of T.S. E liot and his followers—among them, the New Critics—who persist with ‘minute verbal analysis’ despite the fact that a work on the scale of Paradise Lost ‘produces an effect which goes far beyond its strictly linguistic qualities’.