This chapter turns from a broader consideration of poetic works on divine and human creation to the most influential biblical epic in English: Milton’s Paradise Lost. Recent work on Milton has shown harmony between the content and form of Paradise Lost and the methods and aims of modern science. However, an underappreciated strand of scientific reform still needs to be integrated into our understanding of Milton’s relationship to science: a marginalization of natural theology. By working against this trend, Milton aligns himself instead with those scientific reformers who promoted natural theology, providing in Paradise Lost a rubric for applying human science to theological understanding while resisting the anthropocentrism and modern notion of reason that undergirded many contemporary prose works of natural theology. In contrast with contemporaries who emphasized the evidence of divine power in nature, Milton insists that love is the divine attribute most visible in creation, even outside of Eden. A natural theology that discerns divine love is more at home in Milton’s poetic world than in the increasingly reductive material reality on which works of physico-theology drew.

John Milton is a major author in the history of writing the nation in early modern England. A visionary Protestant writer with a keen sense of prophetic vocation, he aligned his authorial identity closely with England as an exceptional ’Nation chos’n before any other’. Yet in his works written before, during and after the English Revolution, Milton agonises over the godly nation’s susceptibility to political and religious servility, so that he vacillates between intense identification with England and strong repulsion. Milton’s evolving relation to the nation thus remains conflicted and volatile. England’s exceptionalism can never be taken for granted: it must be strenuously tested, reassessed and reimagined. Although the late Milton turns away from national exceptionalism and challenges Restoration’s cultural, religious and political values, the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost, published close to the Glorious Revolution, tells another complex story about the posthumous creation of Milton as England’s exceptional national poet.

Paradise Lost is constructed almost entirely of men talking to other men. Depending heavily on conversation and social discourse, Milton's epic takes the ideology of conversation in his culture seriously. Employing conversation to create social rank and hierarchy, while also using it to suggest homosocial pleasure and erotic attraction, Paradise Lost makes Adam, Raphael, the Son, Eve, and Satan into talkers who make power while they make desire. By linking conversation itself to the poem's hierarchies and hegemonic superstructures, this chapter argues that small talk and social discourse are key levers of authority-making in the poem and in early modern England.

This chapter explores structural differences between the 1667 ten-book edition and the revised twelve-book version of 1674, not only to continue a reconsideration of Eve, but to revive attention to the implications of the formal properties of the revision, and to argue that this reformation formally embodies the narrative’s claims about how to adjust to modernity. The drama created by the final, reconfigured two books highlights how Adam and Eve and their relationship change and grow during the poem. At the end, the poem’s profound linguistic tensions are instantiated by Eve, while Adam’s reaction and the narrator’s description emphasize the pleasures of pluralistic readings. In short, the reformation of Paradise Lost rebalances the poem, by countering the scale of the consequences from the War in Heaven with a proportional rearrangement of the invocations. Its twelve-book shape mitigates against loss and creates a space to emphasize the continued growth of the two human characters, particularly Adam. Perhaps most importantly, the new, concluding pair of books provide a space of non-domination in which Eve can emerge and be recognized as the poet she is.

Milton’s last poems operate as an array, a contiguous set of shifts in narrative and generic evaluation published over just a seven-year period. Charles Taylor argues that modernity “must be understood as . . . multiform contestation.” In Milton’s last three poems, it is. As an epic as a sui generis brief epic, and as a tragedy, respectively, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes represent, then, the values, the pressures, and sometimes even the losses, of pluralism. That these positions can overlap, though, is central to Milton’s contribution to a discussion of modernity, contrary to the familiar epochal break and shift of ideas that modernity is usually taken to represent. The different responses to the experience of modernity, while not necessarily modern, are part of that modernity nonetheless. In the introduction, I preliminarily I develop senses of modernity and responses to it. I also explore the relationship between context, fiction, anachronism, and the novel in the reception of Milton three late poems.

In the tensions between sight and sound, between the horizontal and the vertical, and between the narrative and the order of its telling, Paradise Lost hosts an expansive plurality to which each reader potentially contributes. What Milton’s epic offers to reading is central to the poem’s relationship to the experience of modernity. With a 1668 printing of the first, 10-book edition, Paradise Lost initiates a pattern for Milton’s late poems: prose prefaces in which Milton highlights how the poem is organized, and thus presumably ways the poems should be read. The story told in Paradise Lost seems to be simple in its familiarity: Satan rebels against God, comes to Earth, tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and then she offers the fruit to Adam, who also partakes, after which God sentences both of them to different curses, and banishes them out of Eden. In Milton’s telling, though, the story is at first ten then ultimately twelve books (and roughly 10,000 lines) long, and layered with opposed possibilities, often in the same sentences and lines. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

The tradition of unclassical scriptural paraphrase, such as that found in Du Bartas’ Sepmaines and Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, has attracted some thoughtful critical attention in recent years. But Du Bartas’ work was modelled – albeit with elements of contention – on didactic epic of the type exemplified by Palingenius’ Zodiacus Vitae, an ubiquitous schooltext which was the very opposite of 'sub-canonical' in the seventeenth century. For the modern reader, approaching Milton's Paradise Lost via Virgil and Homer, the digressive mode of Du Bartas and the unclassical elements of Paradise Lost seem anomalous. Early modern poets and readers, however, were taught to approach the classics via approved Protestant or quasi-Protestant works composed by near contemporaries. Of these, the Zodiacus Vitae, though now largely forgotten and when remembered, almost universally misrepresented, was in England among one of the most influential. This chapter takes the achievement and allure of Palingenius’ poem seriously as a model in examining some of the very large number of examples of ‘unclassical epic’ read and composed by English authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Critical appraisals of Milton’s influence on Romantic poets tend to centre on two aspects: first, the idea that they took their cue from Milton’s archangel Michael in Book 12 of Paradise Lost who advises Adam to seek a ‘paradise within’, conventionally interpreted as signifying the compensatory ‘inward light’ of imagination;1 second, that they fought the political or ethical corner of Milton’s Satan, developing ‘an elaborate exegesis of his human qualities and reactions’, a view we see most famously in Southey’s reference to Byron, Shelley and Hunt as a ‘Satanic School’.2 Byron’s Cain (1821), his most extended fictional engagement with Paradise Lost, has usually been viewed in this light and was castigated for it by contemporary reviewers. Many noted that Byron allowed Lucifer to develop arguments ‘without refutation’ – quite unlike Milton, whose Satan is checked at every turn by the warning voice of God and a chorus of archangels – thus undervaluing the alternative perspectives and dramatic significance of Byron’s other mortal characters, particularly Abel and Cain’s wife, whom he named Adah.3 Byron never attempted an imaginative recalibration of Milton’s epic, in the manner of Blake in his prophetic books or Wordsworth in The Prelude, and Truman Guy Steffan rightly notes that when Byron’s ‘Lucifer encouraged Cain to use his reason and judgment in determining right and wrong, he was far from Blake’s position’.4

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.