“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669challenge is, “under long obedience tried,” to make themselves, their marital rela-
tionship, and their garden – the nucleus of the human world – ever more perfect.^103
Into this radically new kind of epic, Milton incorporates many particular genres in
many modes: romance, pastoral, georgic, comedic, tragic, rhetorical, lyric.^104 And
into his sublime epic high style he incorporated a wide range of other styles: collo-
quial, dialogic, lyric, hymnic, elegiac, mock-heroic, denunciatory, ironic, oratori-
cal, ornate, plain.
In the Proems to Books I, III, VII, and IX, Milton explores, more profoundly
than ever before, the problematics of authorship,^105 an issue that had concerned him
almost from the beginning of his career. In no other epic does the poet insert
himself so directly and extensively into his work, making his own experience in
writing the poem a part of and an analogue to his story.^106 In these Proems the
Miltonic Bard, with “his garland and singing robes about him,”^107 dramatizes his
struggle to understand how prophetic inspiration, literary tradition, and authorial
originality combine in the writing of his poem. By his choice of subject, genre, and
blank verse, he distances himself from Dryden, Davenant, Cowley, and other con-
temporary aspirants to epic, but his allusions continually acknowlege debts to the
great ancients – Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Lucretius – and to such moderns
as Ariosto, Tasso, Du Bartas, Camõens, and Spenser.^108 Yet he hopes and expects to
surpass them, since his subject is both truer and more heroic than theirs, and since
he looks for illumination and collaboration to the divine source of both truth and
creativity. Milton makes his bold claims to originality not as autonomous author
but as prophetic bard.
In the first Proem (I.1–26) Milton’s epic proposition and invocation acknowl-
edge derivation from the classical and Renaissance epic tradition through a dense
texture of formal and verbal echoes. He highlights the problematics of derivation
and originality by claiming originality in Ariosto’s very words: “Cosa non detta in
prosa mai ne in rima,” “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.”^109 Also, by
referring to Moses and the first words of Genesis – “That Shepherd, who first
taught the chosen Seed, / In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth / Rose out
of Chaos” – he places himself in the line of the prophet–poet who “first taught” the
matter his poem now teaches.^110 The invocation points to two divine sources of
Milton’s poetic power: the Heavenly Muse who formerly inspired the sacred po-
etry of Moses, David, and the Prophets; and the Spirit of God who must act to
illumine this Bard’s darkness, raise his fallenness, and instruct him with the Spirit’s
own knowledge, creating in him a new nature able to produce the universe of his
poem. The Bard endeavors to practice the Christian heroism his poem explores as
he daringly attempts to soar “Above the Aonian Mount” despite his fallenness, and
willingly embraces the paradoxical challenge of creating a poem that both is not,
and is, his own.
The Proem to Book III, “Hail holy Light” (1–55), a literary hymn to light as a
primary manifestation of God, carries on the Miltonic Bard’s identification with his