The Course of English Poetry – 4 93ripened continuity and deepened strength of his earlier style and
vision. Nothing quite so great perhaps, but surely something
more opulent, many-toned and perfect. As things happened, it
is byParadise Lostthat he occupies his high rank among the
poets. That too imperfect grandiose epic is the one supreme
fruit left by the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical
manner, achieve beauty of poetic expression disciplined by a high
intellectual severity and forge a complete balance and measured
perfection of architectonic form and structure.
Paradise Lostis one of the few great epic poems in the
world’s literature; certain qualities in it reach heights which
no other of them had climbed, even though as a whole it has
defects and elements of failure which are absent in the other
great world epics. Rhythm and speech have never attained to
a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement; seldom
has there been an equal sublimity of flight. And to a great extent
Milton has done in this respect what he had set out to do; he has
given English poetic speech a language of intellectual thought
which is of itself highly poetic without depending on any of the
formal aids of poetic expression except those which are always
essential and indispensable, a speech which succeeds by its own
intrinsic force and is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain
inspired intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim
of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has
fulfilled it. At the same time he has raised this achievement to a
highest possible pitch by that peculiar grandeur in the soul and
manner of the utterance and that magnificence of sound-tones
and amplitude of gait in the rhythm which belong to him alone
of poets. These qualities are easily sustained throughout this
long work, because with him they are less an art, great artist
though he is, than the natural language of his spirit and the
natural sound of its motion. His aim is high, his subject loftier
than that of any one of his predecessors except Dante. There
is nowhere any more magnificently successful opening than the
conception and execution of his Satan and Hell; nowhere has
there been a more powerful portraiture of the living spirit of
egoistic revolt fallen to its natural element of darkness and pain