For those of us who have long loved (or hated) Paradise Lost, this is one of those rare and refreshing books that invites us to compare our feelings with other committed readers over the centuries. The poemmay well be the only major work in the western canon that nobody can avoid for long – even if it comes down to making a decision not to read it at all, or just to give up trying.
Orlando Reade argues that it may also be the most ‘revolutionary’ text commonly available in modern classrooms – written by a man who, in his time, took extreme positions on everything from divorce (he was all for it) and whether kings have a divine right to keep their heads (they don’t). John Milton read widely and lived during the most conflict-driven period of British history. His longest poem – possibly the greatest poetic work ever composed – wrestles with issues he’d previously discussed in a series of widely read polemical pamphlets. For notwithstanding its lyrical and dramatic beauties (the battles between heaven and hell outblaze those of any modern fantasy trilogy), Paradise Lost is mostly about revolution – how much can individuals revolt against God, father, church and king without bringing all the heavens down upon their heads.
Some of Reade’s best pages concern those Romantic Age poets who moved Milton away from theological discussions about justifying the ways of God to men and into the boiling late 18th-century world of cultural politics. First and foremost was William Blake, who a friend reportedly found in his summer house ‘acting out’ scenes from pre-lapsarian Eden, naked as a jaybird with his equally naked wife Catherine.
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