“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669himself cover from the censors.^1 Rather, when Milton challenges stereotypes he
inevitably risks activating them. He engages his readers to work through complex
issues and situations to right understandings, and thereby learn to be virtuous and
liberty-loving citizens. Milton’s fit readers may have been few, but he wanted his
poem to produce as many more of them as possible.
He could take pleasure in the fact that Paradise Lost sold reasonably well, and in
the praises of a few judicious critics. The later issues were supplemented by prelimi-
nary matter requested by the printer, including a statement in which Milton de-
fended his use of blank verse against the contemporary norm of rhyme for heroic
poetry and drama – an aesthetic debate that had political implications. Soon after he
finished his great epic Milton began work on its complement, the brief epic Paradise
Regained.
“This Subject for Heroic Song Pleas’d Me Long Choosing and
Beginning Late”
Sometime in June, 1665, Milton and his family settled into a small, irregular cottage
of brick and wooden beams at the edge of the peaceful village of Chalfont, and
remained there for eight or nine months. In Milton’s time it seems to have had
three sitting rooms and a kitchen downstairs, as well as five quite small bedrooms,
two of them up a small staircase or ladder (plate 14).^2 There was and is a pleasant
garden in which Milton sat to take the air. He could take agreeable walks in the
village past an old church and churchyard, inns, timber-joisted houses, and a duck
pond, and longer strolls to the market-town of Beaconsfield, about four miles away.
Milton had connections in the area, among them the Fleetwoods, the family who
held the manor house of the Vache for a century until it was forfeited by the
regicide George Fleetwood in 1661.^3 Milton’s Quaker friend Isaac Pennington
who lived in the next village, Chalfont St Peter, would have introduced him to the
rather extensive Quaker community in the area and welcomed him at his mansion,
the Grange.^4 But there may have been little socializing at first, since the plague had
also reached several Buckinghamshire towns and there were cases in Chalfont St
Giles itself.^5 Thomas Ellwood, Milton’s Quaker student and friend who had ar-
ranged his occupancy of the cottage, was in prison when he arrived and could not
visit him until after August 1, “to welcome him into the Country.” Ellwood was
then given the manuscript of Paradise Lost to read, did so, and and returned it to
Milton while he was still at Chalfont:
After some common Discourses had passed between us, he called for a Manuscript of
his; which being brought he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me, and
read it at my Leisure, and when I had so done, return it to him, with my Judgment
thereupon.