Paradise Lost, was first published in 1667. Milton had begun compose it, were are told, in 1658; he had then been totally blind for over five years, and we have to imagine the poem taking shape by a process of mental composition, the dictation of perhaps fifty lines at a time, and repeated checking and revision. When it was complete, there was a final revision, wich took about two years; and the subsequent process of getting the poem into print were also used to check the details. These years in wich Milton concentrated on the creation of his epic saw him carrying out a task wich we had first thought of many years before, in quite different circumstances. Paradise Lost is an extraordinary archievement; the difficulties Milton overcame in getting it composed and printed had been preceded by other difficulties, in the ten or twelve years before he went blind. Yet all the obstacles he had to face could also be said to have contributed to the peculiar greatness of the poem that the at last produced.

The first two books of Paradise Lost are not concerned with any major theological controversy, like the exact nature of the Son or whether our world was created out of nothing or was a part of God Himself. The following points, however, are worthy of mention.

FALLEN ANGELS AND PAGAN GODS:
Milton adpots the view that the fallen angels lost their original names after their fall, and became known to man as the heathen idols of the Old Testament and the pagan deities of Egypt, Greece and Rome. The long list that extends from 1.356 to 521 shows both the extent of Milton´s learning and the dual nature of his cultural debt to the scriptures and Classics.
 
 
 

HOLY SPIRIT AND HEANVELY MUSE:
Readers of books I and II, and particularly of the opening lines, might be left in some uncertainty as to to the exact nature of the Spirit Milton is here invoking. Is it the Holy Ghost, that rather nebulous third person of the Trinity? It would certanly seem so from lines 17-22. And yet in Book VII.1-39 Milton makes it abundantly clear that he is inwoking Urania, actually addresing her twice by name; but Urania was the Muse of astronomy, not of epic poetry, and Milton states plainly that it is only the name that is the same.

If we accept that Urania was the name Milton gave to his Muse of Christian epic, there is no contradiction:Milton recognises the power and pre-minence of Holy Spirit from a religious point of view, and certanly asks for help and instructions from this source in Book I. 17-22; but, as an artist, he was writing an epic, and epic poets began by invoking a Muse. Milton therefore also begins by invoking a Muse, but, insisting on the artistic as well as the moral superiority of the scriptural over the classical and Paradise Reained, he places his Muse on, Moses´s mountain rather than Parnassus. He certainly regarded himself as divinely inspired, and would lie in bed in the early morming until he had composed a passage in his head, when he would call out that he was “ready to be milked”. He was always deeply interested in his own creative process as a poet, and the openings of Books III,VII and particularly Ix repeat the concern with poetic composition shown in Book I and earlier, in Lycidas and the “Twenty-Third Birthday” sonnet.

FREE WILL:
One of the most vexed of theological questions has always been the exent to wich a man-or a fallen angel-is free to choose his own course of action. Milton´s own position here is very clear, and his repeated insistence that man´s power of reason gives him the freedom to choose between good and evil brought him into conflict with the Presbyterian faction of the Republican party with its Calvinistic insitence on predestination and the election of the chosen few (themselves) to evelarsing bliss.

 In speech in Book III.95-128, God the Father makes it clear that man was created strong enough to have resisted temptation, but left free to fall; and the fact that God foverknew that he would fall did not itself bring the fall about. The fallen angels also are at pains to stress their leadership not only by heavenly decree but by his own merit, pre-eminence in battle and by free election. How then do the angels account for their defeat, if their cause was just and their power equal to God´s? They frequently suggest than Chance, not God, has been the cause of their fall. “Chance governs all” (Book II.910). They also doubt whether the divine essence of wich they are made can de destroyed, even by God; Moloch proposes a renewal of the battle on the grounds that, if they can be annihilated, they will at least be at peace in oblivion, whereas if they cannot be destroyed, their condition caannot be changued fos the worse. Sin warns her father, Satan, that not even he is proof agaist Death´s dart (Book II.810-14). But we are left in some uncertanly as to the exact composition of the fallen angels-the nature of their divine essence and ethereal temper- though the ortodox explanation of the remarkable degree of fredoom enjoyed by the devilsis that it is by God´s permision and is all part of his grand design for the World, much of wich is beyond mere human understanding.

©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.