“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669When I came home, and had set myself to read it, I found it was that Excellent
POEM which he entituled PARADISE LOST. After I had, with the best Attention,
read it through, I made him another Visit, and returned him his Book, with due
Acknowledgement of the Favour he had done me, in Communicating it to me. He
asked me how I liked it, and what I thought of it; which I modestly, but freely told
him: and after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, Thou hast said
much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found? He made me no
Answer, but sate some time in a Muse: then brake of that discourse, and fell upon
another Subject.^6Apparently, Milton had a draft of Paradise Lost in hand by August, 1665, though
he probably continued working on it at Chalfont and in London until he gave it to
the printer 18 months later. He had been thinking about writing epic for decades –
as far back as his collegiate Vacation Exercise. In 1642, when he wrote The Reason of
Church-governement, he was thinking about an epic on the model of Virgil and Tasso
with a great national hero, and as he had come to doubt King Arthur’s historicity,
he considered King Alfred.^7 The Virgilian model, celebrating the founding of the
empire of the Caesars which brought with it the ruin of the Roman republic,
would be a problematic model for this republican poet. So would Tasso’s celebra-
tion, within the story of the first crusade, of the restoration of Counter-Reforma-
tion hegemony over all kinds of rebellion and dissent.^8 Tasso had decreed that the
heroic poem should concern Christian personages, that the plot should take place
in an age far enough distant to allow taking poetic liberties with history, and that
the supernatural realm should be Christian.^9 We cannot be sure just when Milton
decided that the great epic subject for his own times had to be the Fall and its
consequences, “all our woe”: not the founding of a great empire or nation, but the
loss of an earthly paradise and with it any possibility of founding an enduring ver-
sion of the City of God on earth. Edward Phillips reports that “several Years before
the Poem was begun” he saw the lines that now form the opening of Satan’s address
to the Sun (PL 4.32–41), at which time the speech was designed for the beginning
of a tragedy on the Fall along the lines sketched out in the Trinity manuscript.^10
Milton probably settled on his subject in the later 1650s, as he was losing faith
that the English people might become the nation of prophets he had imagined in
Areopagitica, or that its government might become the aristocratic republic he pro-
jected in Tenure and the Defensio. John Aubrey heard from Edward Phillips that
Milton began the poem “about 2 yeares before the K. came-in, and finished about
3 yeares after the K’s Restauracion,” working on it only during the winter months
and spending four or five years on it (EL 13). Phillips’s own account suggests a
somewhat longer period of composition and revision, referring to “all the years he
was about this Poem” (EL 72–3). The first half may have been substantially com-
pleted before 1660, but the Proem to Book VII suggests that much or most of the
final six books postdate the Restoration. Declaring that “Half yet remaines un-
sung,” the Bard points to his own perilous position in the Restoration milieu: he is