“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669How this contact was made and whether Milton provided funds to settle Deborah
is not known; Milton’s good friend Lady Ranelagh, with her Irish connections,
may have helped arrange the matter. Milton probably thought he was doing the
best he could for his daughters given his circumstances, the domestic turmoil, and a
promise which he seems to have regarded as a contract, to leave his estate to the
wife who was taking good care of him. But the daughters thought otherwise and
deeply resented Elizabeth Minshull who, as they saw it, had cut them out of the
estate they would otherwise have inherited.
“Things Unattempted Yet in Prose or Rhime”
Milton’s epic is preeminently a poem about knowing and choosing – for the Miltonic
Bard, for his characters, and for the reader. It foregrounds education, a life-long
concern of Milton’s, and of special importance to him after the Restoration as a
means to help produce discerning, virtuous, liberty-loving human beings and citi-
zens. Almost half the poem is given over to the formal education of Adam and Eve,
by Raphael before and by Michael after the Fall.^100 God himself takes on the role of
educator as he engages in Socratic dialogue with his Son about humankind’s fall
and redemption (3.80–343) and with Adam over his request for a mate (8.357–
451). Adam and Eve’s dialogues with each other involve them in an ongoing proc-
ess of self-education about themselves and their world. The Miltonic Bard educates
his readers by exercising them in rigorous judgment, imaginative apprehension,
and choice. By setting his poem in relation to other great epics and works in other
genres, he involves readers in a critique of the values associated with those other
heroes and genres, as well as with issues of contemporary politics and theology.
The poem’s form makes its first overt political statement as, in the 1667 version,
Milton eschewed Virgil’s twelve-book epic format with its Roman imperialist and
royalist associations for the ten-book model of the republican Lucan.^101 But he
included the full range of topics and conventions common to the Homeric and
Virgilian epic tradition.^102 His poem has invocations to the Muse; a beginning in
medias res; an Achilles-like hero in Satan; a Homeric catalogue of Satan’s generals;
councils in Hell and in Heaven; epic pageants and games; supernatural powers –
God, the Son, and good and evil angels. It also has a fierce battle in Heaven pitting
army against army, replete with chariot clashes, taunts and vaunts, and hill-hurlings;
single combats of heroes, most notably the Son of God as a lone warrior overcom-
ing the entire Satanic force; narratives of past actions in Raphael’s narratives of the
War in Heaven and the Creation; and prophecies of the hero’s descendants in
Michael’s biblical history of humankind. Yet at a more fundamental level, Milton’s
epic defines itself against the traditional epic subject – wars and empire – and the
traditional epic hero as the epitome of courage and battle prowess. His protagonists
are a domestic pair; the scene of their action is a pastoral garden; and their primary