JBP's benzo-fueld legendary lexeme "There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see" may actually have been an allusion to the opening line from Lewis' Preface

"The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it iswhat it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has bee.n discovered the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral." pp 1

Use me in Ch 1 talking about " Milton is not a pleasure to read:

"The unfortunate reader has set out expecting 'good lines'-little ebullient patches of delightsuch as he is accustomed to find in lyrics, and has thought he was finding them in things that took his fancy for accidental reasons during the first five minutes; after that, finding that the poem cannot really be read in this way, he has given it up. Of the continuity of a long narrative poem, the subordination of the line to the paragraph and the paragraph to the Book and even of the Book to the whole, of the grand sweeping effects that take a quarter of an hour to develop themselves, he has had no conception. " pp 1-2

TSE misreads PL, as doe Ross, Empson, and even C.S. Lewis himself

" I have learned from the errors of critics, including myself, who sometimes regard as faults in Paradise Lost those very properties which the poet laboured hardest to attain and which, rightly enjoyed, are essential to its specific delightfulness (olK€ta �Soll1]). Our study of Milton's epic must therefore begin with a study of epic in general. " pp 2

Milton's command of Hebrew

"That is, he has told us that his preference for the Hebrew is not only moral and religious, but aesthetic also.1 I once had a pu pi I, innocent alike of the Greek and of the Hebrew tongue, who did not think himself thereby disqualified from pronouncing this judgement a proof of Milton's bad taste ; the rest of us, whose Greek is amateurish and who have no Hebrew, must leave Milton to discuss the question with his peers. But if any man will read aloud on alternate mornings for a single month a page of Pindar and a page of the Psalms in any translation he chooses, I think I can guess which he will first grow tired of. " pp 4-5

Layup to tuck this away in Memory

"we may surmise that the romantic subject was rejected at about the same time as the romantic form, the Spenserian or Italian type of epic. A much more Spenserian Milton-the Milton of L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Comus-had to be partially repressed before Paradise Lost could be written" pp 6-7

Unrelated, but Great Man Theory

"The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development--one either as pacific as Tolstoi or as military as Napoleon, either as clotted as Wagner or as angelic as Mozart. Milton is certainly not that kind of great man. He is a great Man. 'On ne montre pas sa grandeur,' says Pascal, 'pour etre a une extremite, mais bien en touchant les deux a la jois et remplissant tout l' entre-deux.' " pp 7-8

Presentism

Invisible church should be the name of the conclusion chaopter

Solitary guide in modernity

""Mr. Eliot says bluntly and frankly that the best contemporary practising poets are the only 'jury of judgement' 1 whose verdict on his own views of Paradise Lost he will accept. And Mr. Eliot is here simply rendering explicit a notion that has become increasingly prevalent for about a hundred yearsthe notion that poets are the only judges of poetry." pp 9

"Shall I then go to Mr. Eliot and ask him to tell me who the best contemporary poets are ? But this, again, will be useless. I personally may think Mr. Eliot a poet-in fact, I do -but then, as he has explained to me, my thoughts on such a point are worthless. I cannot find out whether Mr. Eliot is a poet or not; and until I have found out I cannot know whether his testimony to the poethood of Mr. Pound and Mr. Auden is valid. And for the same reason I cannot find out whether their testimony to his poethood is valid. Poets become on this view an unrecognizable society (an Invisible Church), and their mutual criticism goes on within a closed circle which no outsider can possibly break into at any point. " pp 10

"But since no man of high intellectual honour can base his thought on an exposed petitio the real result is that no such man can criticize poetry at all, neither his own poetry nor that of his neighbour. The republic of letters resolves itself into an aggregate of uncommunicating and unwindowed monads; each has unawares crowned and mitred himself Pope and King of Pointland. " pp 10

Explain the cathedral comment in a footnote which references the other thing and ties in JBP

"In the sweep of recitation no individual line is going to count for very much. The pleasure which moderns chiefly desire from printed poetry is ruled out anyway. You cannot ponder over single lines and let them dissolve on the mind like lozenges. That is the wrong way of using this sort of poetry. It is not built up of isolated effects; the poetry is in the paragraph, or the whole episode. To look for single, 'good' lines is like looking for single 'good' stones in a cathedral. " pp 21

TSE get fucked

"We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not. They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts that no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly proclaimed itself to be poetry. What is the point of having a poet, inspired by the Muse, if he tells the stories just as you or I would have told them ? It will be seen that these two demands, taken together, absolutely necessitate a Poetic Diction ; that is, a language which is familiar because it is used in every part of every poem, but unfamiliar because it is not used outside poetry" pp 21-22

"If he had not been blind himself, he would still (though with less knowledge to guide him) have put just those elements of a blind man's experience into the mouth of Samson : for the 'disposition of his fable' so as to 'stand best with verisimilitude and decorum' requires them. On the other hand, whatever is calm and great, whatever associations make blindness venerable-all this he selects for the opening of Book 111. Sincerity and insincerity are words that have no application to either case. W'! want a great blind poet in the one, we want a suffering and questioning prisoner in the other. 'Decorum is the grand masterpiece.'" pp 60

Could include whenever we intro DDC

"We must therefore turn a deaf ear to Professor Saurat when he invites us 'to study what there is of lasting originality in Milton's thought and especially to disentangle from theological rubbish the permanent and human interest' (Milton, p. I I I). This is like asking us to study Hamlet after the 'rubbish' of the revenge code has been removed, or centipedes when free of their irrelevant legs, or Gothic architecture without the pointed arches. Milton's thought, when purged of its theology, does not exist. Our plap must be very different-to plunge right into the 'rubbish', to see the world as if we believed it, and then, while we still hold that position in our imagination, to see what sort of a poem results. " pp 65

No magic to the apple. It's selection is arbitrary

"Satan assumes that knowledge is magically contained in the apple and will pass to the eater whether those who have forbidden the eating wish or no (Ix, 72 I et seq.). Good characters speak quite differently. For them the apple is 'sole pledge of his obedience' (m, 95), the 'sign of our obedience' (Iv, 428), the subject of a single and just command (v, 55 I), 'My sole command' (vm, 329). The view that if the apple has no intrinsic magic then the breach of the prohibition becomes a small matter-in other words that the Miltonic God is making a great pother about nothing-is expressed only by Satan. 'Him by fraud I have seduc'd From his Creator, and the more to increase Your wonder, with an Apple ; he thereat Offended, worth your laughter, hath giv'n up Both his beloved Man and all his World' (x, 485). St. Augustine considers the disobedience heinous precisely because obedience was so easy (De Civ. Dei, XIV, I 2)." pp 69

1. CSL guilty of the same thing of "surely milton made a mistake" that he points out in other critics here

2. preempts Empson's whole critique here

"Milton, they feel, must have meant something more than that! And here once again, the doctrine of the unchanging human heart comes into play. If there is no God, then Milton's poem, as interpreted by Addison, has no obvious relation to real life. It is therefore necessary to sweep away the main thing Milton was writing about as a mere historical accident and to fix on quite marginal or subsidiary aspects of his work as the real core. For there can be no serious doubt that Milton meant just what Addison said : neither more, nor less, nor other than that. If you can't be interested in that, you can't be interested in Paradise Lost. " pp 71

Neitzschean read of Milton

"Johnson has complained that Milton thought men made only for rebellion and women only for obedience." pp 72

Monism / Timaeus

"It belongs to the ancient orthodox tradition of European ethics from Aristotle to Johnson himself, and a failure to understand it entails a false criticism not only of Paradise Lost, but of nearly all literature before the revolutionary period. It may be called the Hierarchical conception. According to this conception degrees of value are objectively present in the universe. Everything except God has some natural superior ; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior. The goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its natural inferiors. " pp 73

FABRIC

"The Hierarchical idea is not merely stuck on to his poem at points where doctrine demands it: it is the indwelling life of the whole work, it foams or burgeons out of it at every moment. " pp 79

The poem is neither catholic nor Catholic for either definition of religius or universal. Ross and Lewis both attempt to co-opt the great poem to their own favorite brand of Christianity. Milton hated Catholics and the Catholic church. He denied the trinity, ignored the incarnation, didn't attend church, and espouses weird (from an/any orthodox view) monism throughout the poem. Lewis and Ross both seem to ignore these elements and index on milquetoast elements of generic Christianity and make claims of primacy about how then the poem must be catholic. Read the catechism, then read the poem.

"only discoverable by search." like a straightforward reading? mad'st the abyss pregnant requires no such sleuthing.

"In so far as Paradise Lost is Augustinian and Hierarchical it is also Catholic in the sense of basing its poetry on conceptions that have been held 'always and everywhere and by all'. This Catholic quality is so predominant that it is the first impression any unbiased reader would receive. Heretical elements exist in it, but are only discoverable by search : any criticism which forces them into the foreground is mistaken, and ignores the fact that this poem was accepted as orthodox by many generations of acute readers well grounded in theology. " pp 82

Not sure that's appropriate in a poem which is so precise wirth its diciton. But what is the og etymology of "begot"

"His Arianism, in so far as it here concerns us, is stated in the words 'All these passages prove the existence of the Son before the world was made, but they conclude nothing respecting His generation from all eternity.' Professor Saurat suggests that this heresy appears in Paradise Lost, v, 603, when the Father announces to the angels 'This day have I begot whom I declare My onely Son.' Now if this is taken literally it means that the Son was created after the angels. But that is impossible in Paradise Lost. We learn in III, 390, that God created the angels by the agency of the Son, and Abdiel refutes Satan by making the same assertion in v, 835-to which the best answer Satan can bring is that 'we weren't there to see it being done'. The puzzle would be insoluble if Milton had not given us the solution in De Doctrina, I, v, where he says that 'beget', when used of the Father in relation to the Son, has two senses, 'the one literal, with reference to the production of the Son, the other metaphorical, with reference to His exaltation' (Bohn, Prose Wks, vol. IV, p. 8o). And it is obvious that 'This day I have begot' must mean 'This day I have exalted,' for otherwise it is inconsistent with the rest of the poem.3 And if this is so, we must admit that Milton's Arianism is not asserted in Paradise Lost." pp 86

• FN: "The real question between Professor Saurat and Sir Herbert Grierson on this point is whether a sense which contradicts the rest of the poet's story is more, or less, probable than one that agrees with it."

WTF hahaha. It does not require outside source to notice the absence of the holy spirit who seems to have been wholessale substiotuted for this pagan Muse.

"I do not say anything in the text about the fact that P.L. has so few references to the Holy Ghost, because I suppose that no reader of the poem would notice this till it had been pointed out to him or draw any theological inference from it if he did. He is mentioned in the invocation to Book I, and His operations in the Church are dealt with pretty fully in Book xu (484- 530). More than this no one would have expected. The Holy Ghost is not matter for epic poetry. We hear very little of Him, or of the Trinity at all, in Tasso." pp 87 - but in a footnote

Should cite M. Saurat for this when mentioning the conspicuous absence of the thing we think abotu when we think of Christ. But caveat that Saurat is not correct. Milton does represent a sacrificial atonment with crucifixion imagery, just not in PR

"Perhaps it will be useful to mention here-though it would concern me more closely if my subject were Paradise Regainedwhat Professor Saurat believes about Milton's presentation of the Redemption. Professor Saurat says (p. I 77) that the Crucifixion plays 'no noticeable part' in the poet's theology and that 'vicarious atonement is no Miltonic conception' (p.I 78)." pp 90

CS L contradicting himself by assuming Milton meant something other than what the word he used meant when he said "begot" in Book V

"The modem habit of writing poems which are to be understood only in the light of the poet's own reading, however idiosyncratic and accidental it may be, was quite foreign to the classical, public, and objective conceptions of poetry which Milton held. You put into your poem not whatever you happened to be interested in, but what was proper, first, to the general end of delighting and instructing the readers, and, second, to the fable and the species of composition. Decorum was the grand masterpiece."

This is a different and weaker claim than the one made at the beginning of the chapter abotu its being a catholic poem...

"In the meantime the sound course is to judge the poem on its merits, not to pre-judge it by reading doctrinal errors into the text. And as far as doctrine goes, the poem is overwhelmingly Christian. Except for a few isolated passages it is not even specifically Protestant or Puritan. It gives the great central tradition. " pp 92

At the apex of his vengeful arc, Satan is his most degwaded

"When in Book x he makes to his peers the useless boast that Chaos had attempted to oppose his journey 'protesting Fate supreame' (480) he may really, by then, have persuaded himself that this was true ; for far earlier in his career he has become more a Lie than a Liar, a personified self-contradiction. " pp 97

Dialectics

"The first is his debate with Abdiel in Book v. Here Satan attempts to maintain the heresr which is at the root of his whole predicament-the doctrine that he is a self-existent being, not a derived being, a creature. Now, of course, the property of a self-existent being is that it can understand its own existence ; it is causa sui. ...

Yet what more futile, since in thus admitting ignorance of its own beginnings it proves that those beginnings lay outside itself ? Satan falls instantly into this trap (850 et seq.)-as indeed he cannot help doing-and produces as proof of his selfexistence what is really its disproof. But even this is not Nonsense enough. Uneasily shifting on the bed of Nonsense which he has made for himself, he then throws out the happy idea that 'fatal course' really produced him, and finally, with a triumphant air, the theory that he sprouted from the soil like a vegetable. Thus, in twenty lines, the being too proud to admit derivation from God, has come to rejoice in believing that he 'just grew' like Topsy or a turnip.

" pp 97=98

Satan's win-con is misery, and he doesn't realize it

"The only exception is Hell, for there, since there is no good to be had, the sovereign cannot have more of it, and therefore cannot be envied. Hence he concludes that the infernal monarchy has a stability which the celestial lacks. That the obedient angels might love to obey is an idea which cannot cross his mind even as a hypothesis. But even within this invincible ignorance contradiction breaks out; for Satan makes this ludicrous proposition a reason for hoping ultimate victory. He does not, apparently, notice that every approach to victory must take away the grounds on which victory is hoped. A stability based on perfect misery, and therefore diminishing with each alleviation of that misery, is held out as something likely to assist in removing the misery altogether (n, I I-43). " pp 98

Dialectics Ungeneration

"What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything. This doom he has brought upon himself; in order to avoid seeing one thing he has, almost voluntarily, incapacitated himself from seeing at all. And thus, throughout the poem, all his torments come, in a sense, at his own bidding, and the Divine judgement might have been expressed in the words 'thy will be done'. He says 'Evil be thou my good' (which includes 'Nonsense be thou my sense') and his prayer is granted." pp 99

Cionsequential placement opf Book III

"We need not doubt that it was the poet's intention to be fair to evil, to give it a run for its money----::to show it first at the height, with all its rants and melodrama and 'Godlike imitated state' about it, and then to trace what actually becomes of such self-intoxication when it encounters reality." pp 100

"The poet did not foresee that his work would one day meet the disarming simplicity of critics who take for gospel things said by the father of falsehood in public speeches to his troops." pp 100

"A fallen man is very like a fallen angel. That, indeed, is one of the things which prevents the Satanic predicament from becoming comic. It is too neat us; and doubtless Milton expected all readers to perceive that in the long run either the Satanic predicament or else the delighted obedience of Messiah, of Abdiel, of Adam, and of Eve, must be their own. It is therefore right to say that Milton has put much of himself into Satan ; but it is unwarrantable to conclude that he was pleased with that part of himself or expected us to be pleased. Because he was, like the rest of us, dammible, it does not follow that he was, like Satan, damned. " pp 101

Trying to get last word in

"On the level of literary criticism the matter cannot be argued further. Each to his taste. " pp 103

Presentism

Counsel in Hell

"The kernel of Moloch's speech is in lines 54-8. Shall we sit 'lingering here' and 'accept this dark approbrious den of shame ?' He cannot bring himself to regard the present misery as unavoidable. There must be a way out of these intolerable sensations; and the way out that occurs to him is rage. It is a way out which often occurs to human beings in a similar position. If the knowledge that we have betrayed what we valued most is unbearable, perhaps furious enmity against it will drown the knowledge. Anger, hatred, blind fury-these are pleasant compared with what we are feeling at the moment. But is fury safe ? That does not matter. Nothing can be worse than the present. To rush blind-headed at the thing we have wronged, to die hitting it-this would be the best that could happen to us. And who knows ? We may hurt it a bit before we die. Moloch is the simplest of the fiends; a mere rat in a trap. " pp 105

Mammon the Artificer

Counsel in Hell

" In those words we read Mammon to the very bottom. He believes that Hell can be made into a substitute for Heaven. For everything that has been lost, you can find something else that will do quite as well. Heaven was magnificent: if Hell is made equally magnificent it must be just as good. There was light in Heaven : if we produce artificial light, it will be just as good. There was darkness in Heaven : why then should we dislike the darkness of Hell?­ for of course there can be only one kind of darkness. This is why Mammon is called 'the least erected spirit that fell from Heav'n' (I, 67g). He has never understood the difference between Hell and Heaven at all. The tragedy has been no tragedy for him : he can do very well without Heaven." pp 106

Probs cite Johnson directly here

"Johnson finds a 'confusion of spirit and matter' pervading Milton's whole account of the war in Heaven. But Johnson approached it under a misconception ; according to him Milton 'saw that immateriality supplied no images' and therefore 'invested' his angels with 'form and matter'-in other words Johnson believed that the corporeality of Milton's angels was a poetic fiction."

Eating

Something which would otherwise be indecorous is in fact entirely appropriate for the grand masterpiece wherein he held this to be a true and crucial tenet of his vision of angelic being

"Thomas Aquinas had believed that angels were purely immaterial; when they 'appear' to human senses they have temporarily assumed a body of air, sufficiently condensed for visibility (Sum. Theol. Ia, Q. u, Art. 2). As Donne says, 'An Angel face and wings Of aire, not pure as it, yet pure, doth weare' (Aire and Angels). Hence, for Aquinas, an angel could not eat; when he appeared to do so it was 'not actual eating, but a symbol of spiritual eating' (ibid. I a, Q. LII, Art. 3). And this is the view which Milton goes out of his way to controvert. When his Archangel dined with Adam he did not simply appear to eat, nor was his refection a mere symbol-'nor seemingly ... nor in mist' (i.e. in a mystical or spiritual fashion. P.L. v, 435). Real hunger preceded, real assimilation, with a consequent rise of temperature, accompanied the meal. It is inconceivable that Milton should have so emphasized the reality of angelic nourishment (and even angelic excretion) if the bodies he attributed to his angels were merely a poetical device. The whole passage becomes intelligible, and much less poetically grotesque, when we realize that Milton put it there chiefly because he thought it true. In this he did not stand alone. " pp 109

Use in relatio to the assage quoted form VI.350

"No doubt these angelic fusions, since angels are corporeal, are not without pleasure : but we must not imagine it after the pattern of our own specialized and rebellious senses. Milton's angels are what may be called Panorganic-'all heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear, All intellect, all sense' (P.L. VI, 350). Whereas men have five distinct senses, each of which receives from the outer world its peculiar stimulus and converts it into its peculiar kind of sensation, these sensations being later united into a reflection of the world by Common Sense, angels, we are to suppose, have a single sensibility equally distributed through the whole aereal body and capable of picking up all those stimuli which are portioned out with us among the different senses, and doubtless some to which none of our senses respond. " pp 113-14

Lewis is Surprised by Sin

This is precisely the kind of reaction hich Fish seeks to assert is intentional on Milton's part. We see superiority and are disgusted with outselves by our inability to resist Satan's rhetoric which we intellectually know is facetious and Fallen

Maybe include somewhere where Satan Lies

"I expected something which Milton never intended to give and which, if he had given it, would have gratified a somewhat commonplace taste in me and would have been hardly consistent with the story he had to tell. I had come to the poem associating innocence with childishness. I had also an evolutionary background which led me to think of early men, and therefore a fortiori of the first men, as savages. The beauty I expected in Adam and Eve was that of the primitive, the unsophisticated, the naif. I had hoped to be shown their inarticulate delight in a new world which they were spelling out letter by letter, to hear them prattle. Not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted an Adam and Eve whom I could patronize ; and when Milton made it clear that I was not to be allowed to do anything of the sort, I was repelled. " pp 116

Maybe book IX

"In considering his relations with Eve we must constantly remind ourselves of the greatness ofboth personages. Their life together is ceremonial-a minuet, where the modern reader looked for a romp. Until they are fallen and robbed of their original majesty, they hardly ever address each other simply by their names, but by stately periphrases; Fair Consort, My Author and Disposer, Daughter of God and Man, accomplish/ Eve, 0 Sole in whom my thoughts find all repose. Is this ridiculous? At least it is much less ridiculous than similar formalities between fallen creatures in Milton's own time when husbands and wives could still address each other as My Lord and My Lady or Sir and Madam and the morning toilet of a French king was a ritual. Perhaps it is not ridiculous at all if we can once make the initial assumption that the reality whereof all such courtesies since the Fall have been simulacra, was present in Eden. This royal couple could live throughout in the grand manner. They uttered great verse extempore (v, 1 50). " pp 119-20

The subtensions of the official doctrine vs the realities presented clash. Lewis identifies some, but does not conclude that they are intentional and instaead attributes them to poetical errors on Milton's part

"There is even a strong and (in the circumstances) a most offensive suggestion of female bodily shame as an incentive to male desire. I do not mean that Milton's love-passages are objectionable by normal human standards; but they are not consistent with what he himself believes about the world before the Fall. " pp 124

MURDER

"the doom of Nonsense is already at work. Next she decides that she will not tell Adam about the fruit. She will exploit her secret to become his equal--or no, better still, his superior (81 7-25). The rebel is already aiming at tyranny. But presently she remembers that the fruit may, after all, be deadly. She decides that if she is to die, Adam must die with her; it is intolerable that he should be happy, and happy (who knows?) with another woman when she is gone. I am not sure that critics always notice the precise sin which Eve is now committing, yet there is no mystery about it. Its name in English is Murder. " pp 125

"If the precise movement of Eve's mind at this point is not always noticed, that is because Milton's truth to nature is here almost too great, and the reader is involved in the same illusion as Eve herself. The whole thing is so quick, each new element of folly, malice, and corruption enters so unobtrusively, so naturally, that it is hard to realize we have been watching the genesis of murder. " pp 126

"What would have happened if instead ofhis 'compliance bad' Adam had scolded or even chastised Eve and then interceded with God on her behalf, we are not told. The reason we are not told is that Milton does not know. And I think he knows he does not know: he says cautiously that the situation 'seemd remediless' (g 1 g). This ignorance is not without significance. We see the results of our actions, but we do not know what would have happened if we had abstained. For all Adam knew, God might have had other cards in His hand ; but Adam never raised the question, and now nobody will ever know. Rejected goods are invisible. Perhaps God would have killed Eve and left Adam 'in those wilde Woods forlorn': perhaps, if the man had preferred honesty to party loyalty or established morals to adultery, a friend would have been ruined or two hearts broken. But then again, perhaps not. You can find out only by trying it. The only thing Adam knows is that he must hold the fort, and he does not hold it. The effects of the Fall on him are quite unlike its effects on the woman." pp 127

"Adam's hedonistic calculus-his cool statement that he has never (except perhaps once) been so ripe for 'play' as now-strikes the right note. He would not have said that before he fell. Perhaps he would not have said 'to enjoy thee'. Eve is becoming to him a thing. And she does not mind : all her dreams of godhead have come to that. " pp 128

Critics finding the last two book bad

"It suffers from a grave structural flaw. Milton, like Virgil, though telling a short story about the remote past, wishes our minds to be carried to the later results of that story. But he does this less skilfully than Virgil. Not content with following his master in the use of occasional prophecies, allusions, and reflections, he makes his two last books into a brief outline of sacred history from the Fall to the Last Day. Such an untransmuted lump of futurity, coming in a position so momentous for the structural effect of the whole work, is inartistic. And what makes it worse is that the actual writing in this passage is curiously bad. There are fine moments, and a great recovery at the very end. But again and again, as we read his account of Abraham or of the Exodus or of the Passion, we find ourselves saying, as johnson said of the ballad, 'the story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall make less impression on the mind'." pp 129

This is so lazy, he misses the entirety of the altered stile and what it is that the poem has been saying about free will. The poem is a quine for freedom. The poem becomes unenjoyable to read immediately after the fall and Lewis goes "huh, that's weird. Maybe Milton was sick."

"This is sense ; he does not attempt to explain the failure. The truth is we know next to nothing about the causes governing the appearance and disappearance of a talent. Perhaps Milton was in ill health. Perhaps, being old, he yielded to a natural, though disastrous, impatience to get the work finished. And since he was writing in a very new manner, he probably had no useful criticism-no one to tell him that the style of these last books bore only a superficial resemblance to that of his epic prime." pp 130

Empson's read of Milton's God, who is wickeder even than the one depicted in the lines, proves Lewis' point to be wishful or naive

"To be sure, better men than Milton have written better than Milton of God; but the offence ofhis conception is not wholly due to its defects. And furthermore, I think the offence of his presentation is not wholly, or even mainly, due to his conception. The theological flaws (however we assess them) would not be poetically disastrous if only Milton had shown more poetical prudence. A God, theologically speaking, much worse than Milton's, would escape criticism if only He had been made sufficiently awful, mysterious, and vague. When the poet is content to suggest, our theological scruples are cast to the winds. " pp 130

Wherever I mention that he's not the christ. I think it's it's a footnote

"People complain that his Messiah is unlike the Christ of the Gospels. But of course He ought to be. Milton is not writing about the incarnate Lord, but about the cosmic operations of the Son. " pp 131

Not a religious poem, but a poem abotu how to confront religious life

In the religious life man faces God and God faces man. But in the epic it is feigned, for the moment, that we, as readers, can step aside and see the faces both of God and man in profile. We are not invited (as Alexander would have said) to enjoy the spiritual life, but to contemplate the whole pattern within which the spiritual life arises. Making use of a distinction of Johnson's we might say that the subject of the poem 'is not piety, but the motives to piety'. The comparison with Dante may be misleading. No doubt Dante is in most respects simply a better poet than Milton. But he is also doing a different kind of thing. He is telling the story of a spiritual pilgrimage-how one soul fared in its passage through the universe and how all may fear and hope to fare. Milton is giving us the story of the universe itself. Hence, quite apart from any superiority in Dante's art or Dante's spirituality (and I freely admit that he is often superior in both) the Comedy is a religious poem, a poetical expression of religious experience, as Paradise Lost is not. A failure in the last canto of the Paradiso would be disastrous because Dante is himselflooking at God and inviting us to look with him. But Milton has only to describe how the angels and Adam looked at God : and a theologically inadequate symbol for God will not ruin the whole scheme-as in some large religious pictures it may be the position of the Christ that counts rather than the actual drawing of His face." pp 132-33

Last word in

(but he happens to be right I think)

"After Blake, Milton criticism is lost in misunderstanding, and the true line is hardly found again until Mr. Charles Williams's preface. " pp 133

Hated modernism lol

"A much more respectable class of readers dislike it because they are in the grip of a particular kind of realism. Such people think that to organize elementary passions into sentiments is simply to tell lies about them. The mere stream of consciousness is for them the reality, and it is the special function of poetry to remove the elaborations of civility and get at 'life' in the raw. Hence (in part) the popularity of such a work as Ulysses. In. my opinion this whole type of criticism is based on an error. The disorganized consciousness which it regards as specially real is in fact highly artificial. It is discovered by introspection-that is, by artificially suspending all the normal and outgoing activities of the mind and then attending to what is left. In that residuum it discovers no concentrated will, no logical thought, no morals, no stable sentiments, and (in a word) no mental hierarchy. Of course not; for we have deliberately stopped all these things in order to introspect." pp 135

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