Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter. Teach This Poem. Follow Us. Find Poets. In , a new edition was published with some amendments and was divided into the twelve books we are most familiar with now. The whole book is an epic poem — which is a long story told in verse form.
The poem is written in blank verse, or lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, and is over 10, lines long. Milton had become blind by the time he composed much of this poem and so dictated it to different scribes including his daughter, Deborah. The poem is a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve from the biblical book of Genesis which describes the creation of Heaven and Earth and of Adam and Eve.
And in doing so it briefs the reader about the whole plot of the epic tale it is about to relate. Milton commands them all. Wandering, in its various figurative senses, will loom large in Paradise Lost , and will then carry over to the Romantics, among whom it seems to serve as a trope for Romanticism itself. Milton, of course, was a faithful, indeed a militant Christian, although not an orthodox one, and there probably was never a time when Wordsworth or Tennyson, though each experienced a series of upheavals in his religious outlook, would not have described himself as a believer in some sense of the word; but none of this militates against the currents or undercurrents of freethinking in their poetry.
Whatever their relationship to Christianity may be, all of these poets, at least in their finest work, are spiritual wanderers and freethinkers; they are all grappling with the religious crisis, or crisis of modernity, that overtakes Europe during the Renaissance and is deepened by the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Blank verse gives them the license to wander and allows their freethinking tendencies to come to the fore.
We can thus speak of a tradition of blank-verse Romanticism, stretching from Milton to Stevens, in which the poets are linked by a series of complex inter-textual relations anchored by a form. Milton is the progenitor of this tradition, and, as such, is both outside it and enfolded within it. To be sure, these poets do not defer to authority or rely on received wisdom or opinion, but they are not content to remain in uncertainties and mysteries; in their finest poems, they are questing for truth and, if not reaching for fact and reason, at least struggling to find some sort of solid ground.
In Paradise Lost, Milton draws on the classical Greek tradition to conjure the spirits of blind prophets. When Milton began Paradise Lost in , he was in mourning. But these biographical aspects should not downplay the centrality of theology to the poem. Milton the Puritan spent his life engaged in theological disputation on subjects as diverse as toleration, divorce and salvation. Free, and to none accountable, preferring Hard liberty before the easy yoke Of servile Pomp.
Like Cromwell, Milton believed his mission was to usher in the kingdom of God on earth. Although discussion of Paradise Lost often is dominated by political and theological arguments, the poem also contains a tender celebration of love. How can I live without you, how forgo Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined, To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
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