“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–166913
“Higher Argument”: Completing
and Publishing Paradise Lost
1665–1669
The years 1665–9 brought Milton much satisfaction as he finished and published
Paradise Lost, which he probably began writing in earnest around 1658 with the
sporadic and often unsatisfactory help of students, friends, and amanuenses. But
these years also brought anxiety and brushes with catastrophe. The Great Plague
kept Milton in Chalfont St Giles through the summer and autumn of 1665, and
soon after he returned to London he lived through the terror occasioned by the
Great Fire (1666). And soon after that, the Dutch sailed up the Medway and de-
stroyed much of the English fleet. On the domestic front, Milton’s daughters be-
came increasingly resentful about their lives and prospects, and arrangements were
made for them to leave home. They carried their resentments with them.
Into Paradise Lost Milton poured all that he had learned, experienced, desired,
and imagined about life, love, artistic creativity, theology, work, history, and poli-
tics. His political disappointments did not lead him, as is sometimes supposed, to
retreat to a spiritual realm, a “paradise within.” His epic is in fact a more daring
political gesture than we often realize, even as it is also a poem for the ages by a
prophet–poet who placed himself with, or above, Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso,
and the rest. It undertakes a strenuous project of educating readers in the virtues,
values, and attitudes that make a people worthy of liberty. In the moral realm the
Miltonic bard exercises his readers in discernment, rigorous judgment, imaginative
apprehension, and choice by setting his poem in relation to other great epics and
works in other genres, prompting a critique of the values associated with those
other heroes and genres. In the political realm he encourages them to think again,
and think rightly, about the ideological and polemic controversies of the recent war
and its aftermath – about monarchy and tyranny, religious and civil liberty, and
revolution. The reception history of Paradise Lost demonstrates that it was quite
possible to ignore, or to misread, the poem’s politics and theology – but not, I
think, because Milton obscured them out of confusion or misjudgment or to give