(HOST) Vermont Humanities Council executive director and commentator Peter Gilbert tells us that today marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of a man who’s been called "one of the most significant writers and thinkers of all time."
(GILBERT) Today is the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton, generally considered to be, along with Shakespeare, one of the greatest English poets ever. He’s best known for writing "Paradise Lost," the greatest epic poem in English. Milton was also a major political writer; an early advocate of liberalism, he held strong republican views in the age of monarchies. His religious views were unorthodox – even heretical. And he was a passionate, brilliant champion of liberty. When America’s Founding Fathers were drafting the Constitution, they found inspiration in his famous essay condemning censorship, "Areopagitica", as well as other writings of his.
But for most people, John Milton remains first and foremost a poet. He was totally blind when he authored "Paradise Lost," with its twelve books and more than 10,000 lines that undertook to tell the story of war on a cosmic scale between God and Satan, a war that preceded Satan’s sneaking into the Garden of Eden and causing the Fall of Man.
Milton’s poetical style is ornate; sentences are long and complex. So readers have to take a deep breath and hold on until they figure out where the sentence is going. For example, Book One begins with Milton summarizing what his poem will be about and asking his muse, God, for poetic inspiration — in much the same way that Homer’s "Iliad" and "Odyssey" begin – quote:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing, Heav’nly Muse, . . .
Milton’s purpose in writing the poem is nothing less than to "justify the ways of God to men."
Much has been written about the fascinating character of Satan in the poem, the great anti-hero, a fallen angel who would rather be Number One in Hell than Number Two in Heaven. He recognizes that Hell is not so much a place as something inescapable that he carries inside him:
Me miserable! [he famously exclaims,]Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.
Of course, Adam and Eve disobey God and eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and the poem ends with them having to leave the Garden of Eden and enter a "fallen world," where they must labor and where they are no longer immortal. But in standard Christian theology, theirs is a "fortunate fall," because now they have free will. That is, knowing the difference between good and evil, they now have the opportunity to choose good and God voluntarily.
A more recent English poet, A. E. Housman, gives us the comic lines, "And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s ways to man." But despite Housman’s ironic put- down of Milton, I think that Milton’s four hundredth birthday more than justifies our raising a glass in his honor.