Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics)

All illustrations are used with permission
.

fm1.1
Frontispiece portrait of John Milton, by William Faithorne.
The History of Britain
, 1670. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

itr.1
Fall of the Angels. The Caedmon Poems … and Facsimiles of the Illustrations in the Junius Manuscript
. E. P. Dutton & Co., 1916.

fm3.1
Portrait of Milton at age ten, by Cornelius Janssen. The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, N.Y.

fm4.1
Paradise Lost
4.257–90.
Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books
, 1674. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

fm5.1
Paradise Lost
, title page.
Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books
, 1674. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

2.1
Satan on His Throne
, by John Martin.
The Paradise Lost of John Milton
. C. Whittingham, 1846. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

5.1
Raphael Visits Adam and Eve
, by Gustave Doré.
Milton’s Paradise Lost
. Illustrated by Gustave Doré. Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1882. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

6.1
Expulsion of the Rebel Angels
, by Francis Hayman.
Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books
. J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1749. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

9.1
The Serpent Stands Before Eve
, by Edward Burney.
Milton’s Paradise Lost
. C. Whittingham, 1800. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

Milton became entirely blind in 1652, just a short while before the death of his first wife, Mary Powell Milton, followed six weeks later by the death of their infant son, John. He married again in 1656. In 1658 Katharine Woodcock Milton died of complications arising from childbirth, again followed about six weeks later by the death of their infant daughter, Katharine. The political cause to which Milton had devoted two decades of his life suffered a resounding defeat with Charles II’s ascent to the throne in 1660. Through this time of loss and reversal, Milton kept busy on various prose projects, including his theological treatise
Christian Doctrine
, a Latin thesaurus, and his
History of Britain
. He translated a group of Psalms in 1653. He wrote the occasional sonnet. Then, probably before the Restoration, he shook off potential depression, concentrated his powers, and began composing the greatest long poem in the English language. “His great works,” Samuel Johnson declared, “were performed under discountenance, and in blindness, but difficulties vanished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous” (Thorpe 88).

Though Edward Phillips did not mention these dates in his life of Milton, he told John Aubrey that the poem was begun “about 2 years before the king came in, and finished about three years after the king’s restoration” (lxvi). Although Milton associated literary creativity with the temperate Mediterranean climate that had nurtured Homer and Vergil, he himself composed
Paradise Lost
only during the winter, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. Various secretaries copied it down. Milton’s habit was to rise early in the morning with “ten, twenty, or thirty verses” (Darbishire 73) ready for dictation. If his amanuensis happened to be late, he had a little joke ready, and “would complain, saying
he wanted to be milked
” (Darbishire 33).

A major poem had long been his chief ambition. As early as
At a Vacation Exercise
in 1628, the nineteen-year-old undergraduate had magically suspended the expectations of a humorous ritual occasion to evoke the highest raptures of epic, “where the deep transported mind may soar/Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’n’s door/Look in,” and “sing of secret things that came to pass/When beldam Nature in her cradle was.” For a time, as references in
Manso
and
Epitaph for Damon
reveal, he considered a specifically British poem shaped from Arthurian materials. Such a work would be “doctrinal and exemplary to a nation” (RCG in
MLM
841). We do not know precisely why Milton abandoned this plan. He might have come to feel that a patriotic epic was simply too provincial, or that the choice of an early British king for a hero would commit the work to some degree of monarchism; then, too, he might have realized as maturity settled on him that he could admire Spenser without trying to duplicate his achievement.

The first plans for a work on the Fall of man in the Garden of Eden appear in four outlines for a tragic drama in the Trinity College manuscript (CMS), probably drafted in the early 1640s. The third of these is called “Paradise Lost.” Adam and Eve do not take the stage until after the Fall, presumably because their “first naked glory” (PL 9.1115) could not be accommodated in a fallen theater. In the fourth and final version, which shifts from the outline format to narrative prose, Milton roughs in some features of
Paradise Lost
. Satan has a new prominence. The work will end with the expelling angel showing Adam a pageant about the fallen world he is soon to enter.

Paradise Lost
was published in 1667 by the bookseller Samuel Simmons, whose London shop was near Aldersgate. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York possesses a manuscript of Book 1 of the poem in the hand of a copyist, and corrected by as many as five other hands, that was used to set the type for this edition (see Darbishire 1931 for a photographic facsimile). The contract stipulated that Milton was to be paid five pounds for the manuscript, another five pounds upon the sale of a first edition of thirteen hundred copies, and yet another five pounds upon the sale of a second edition of the same size. The earliest
title page of the 1667 quarto identifies Paradise Lost as “A POEM Written in TEN BOOKS By
JOHN MILTON.”
Sales were apparently sluggish. Through 1668 and 1669, the edition was issued with four more title pages, as Simmons added Milton’s note on unrhyming verse and his prose arguments summarizing the action of the poem book by book. When the first printing finally sold out in April 1669, Milton was paid a second five pounds.

It was perhaps Dryden’s announcement in April 1674 that he would transform
Paradise Lost
into a heroic opera (this “never acted” opera was published as
The State of Innocence
in 1677) that led Simmons to print a second and octavo edition of the epic in July 1674. This book contained prefatory poems by Samuel Barrow (in Latin) and Andrew Marvell (in English). The epic was “amended, enlarged, and differently disposed as to the number of books, by his own hand, that is by his own appointment [by someone acting as his agent]” (Edward Phillips in Darbishire, 1932, 75). The shift from ten to twelve books meant dividing the original Book 7 into the new Books 7 and 8, with the addition of four new lines at the beginning of Book 8; the long Book 10 of the first edition was divided into Books 11 and 12, with five new lines at the beginning of Book 12. There were four other major revisions (the reworking of 1.5104–5, the expansion at 5.636–41, the addition of 11.485–87, the alteration of 11.551). The authority of the second edition cannot be doubted in these matters. An unwell Milton made an oral will on or about July 20, 1674, two weeks after the second publication of
Paradise Lost
, and died on November 9, 1674. The second edition of
Paradise Lost
was the last printing over which he exerted control.

There are thirty-seven substantive differences between the two editions. In thirteen of these, the quarto text supplies the superior reading; in only eight is the octavo text superior; editors differ over the remaining sixteen (Moyles 22–26). It would seem from this evidence that editors should not, as many have claimed to do, adopt the 1674 octavo as a copy text and automatically follow it with regard to the accidentals of spelling and punctuation (Moyles 28). There are over eight hundred variants of this kind between the two editions. We have treated each as a separate case rather than defer to the rule of the copy text.