“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669Urania with Calliope, the muse of epic poetry who could not save her son, the
archetypal poet Orpheus, from the Maenads, Milton reads in Orpheus’s fate the
dangers to himself and his poem from the contemporary Maenads, the Restoration
worshippers of Bacchus:
But drive farr off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the Race
Of that wilde Rout that tore the Thracian Bard
In Rhodope, where Woods and Rocks had Eares
To rapture, till the savage clamor dround
Both Harp and Voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her Son. So fail not thou, who thee implores:
For thou art Heav’nlie, shee an empty dreame. (7. 32–9)The Miltonic Bard’s fourth Proem (9.1–47) is formally a verse epistle on the
poetics of the Christian epic. Its placement continues the parallel betweeen the
poem’s action and the poet’s creative act, as Milton assesses various faulty critical
positions regarding heroism and the heroic poem just as his protagonists, Adam and
Eve, are about to make their fatal wrong choices. The Bard’s choices, however, are
judicious, reasoned, well considered, “Since first this Subject for Heroic Song /
Pleas’d me long choosing, and beginning late.” His tragic argument, the Fall, and
the new heroism exemplified in the Son is, he insists, “not less but more Heroic”
than the subjects of the great classical epics and is also far nobler than the romance
matter characteristic of most modern heroic poems:
Not sedulous by Nature to indite
Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument
Heroic deem’d, chief maistrie to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabl’d Knights
In Battels feign’d; the better fortitude
Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe Races and Games,
Or tilting Furniture, emblazon’d Shields,
Impreses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds. (9.27–35)The Miltonic Bard is now confirmed in his role as prophet–poet: he need not
invoke his muse here since she comes nightly “unimplor’d,” and “dictates to me
slumbring, or inspires / Easie my unpremeditated Verse.” This does not mean that
Milton sees himself as the secretary of the Spirit, taking down divine dictation; that
simple version of inspiration is belied by his insistence that he has long considered
and evaluated various epic subjects, topics, and styles, making complex literary judg-
ments and decisions about his art. Rather, his subject is a given of sacred history
whose true meaning must be revealed to him (as to any Christian) by divine illumi-