“I am persuaded”, wrote Luther in a letter of 1523, “that without skill in literature genuine theology cannot understand”. It is just because of Milton´s skill in literature that so much of this introduction has been concerned with his theology. For the reaction against the position universally conceded to Milton down to the end to the 19th is at least as much due to dislike of the poet´s handilng of ultimate question as to anything else-as it illustrated by such vague objetions as “Milton is unsatisfactory”, or he is “a bad man”.

But the beliefs of the author should not in any case prevent the apreciation of his poetry. It is not usually objected to Homer or Virgil that their theology is untenable; and perhaps we only objet to Milton´s because it touches us more nearly. A greater obstacle to the appreciattion of Milton today would seem to lie in the need for careful and repeated reding, not once for the sound and once for the sense, but many times for the combined effect.

Milton is one of the greatest artists in the world, perhaps only equalled in his combination of architectural power and poetic style by Virgil and Dante. During the years when Milton was intending to write a drama on the Fall he made no less than four drafts, wich are preseved for us in the Trinity Manuscript.

The “grand style” wich has been especially associated with Milton since Arnold used the term, is varied in his books more than elsewhere in two directions: by simpler vocabulary and by looser syntax. The former takes us back to Comus, the latter points foward to Samson Agonistes. Style is necessarily more difficult to pin down than subjet matter; for it is more a case of individual impression and the power to discriminate only comes from experience. But it is, in the end, the power and charm of style wich will keep the author and his masterpiece Paradise Lost alive for all lovers of poetry.

For when we speak of style in the fullest sense we do not mean only vocabulary or syntax or the various figures of speech to wich rhetoricians have assigned names, but something going beyond all these, namely the writer´s power to convey to us his own mind : “the style is the man”. T.S.Eliot admited antipathy to the man, and Middleton Murry dubbed him “a bad man of a very particular kind” .Others, without denying an occasional bitterness and harhness in Milton, might prefer to echo Coleridge: “ He was, as every great poet has ever been, a good man”, and to find in these piece strong proof of Milton´s own “plain, heroic, magnitude of mind”.

©York Notes . Paradise Lost .Books I-II and IV-IX. John Milton by Richard James Beck . Paradise Lost . Books I-II and IX-X  By R.E.C. Oxford University Press.