This year marks the 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth. As may be fitting a Puritan poet, the celebrations of his life and work have been more muted than those for Shakespeare’s 400th birthday in 1964. Although it would be a bit of a stretch to claim that Milton is the greatest English poet, there has been a growing consensus since 1688 that “Paradise Lost” is the greatest English poem (or the greatest Christian poem in English or the greatest English epic, whatever these superlatives might mean.) Milton was already aware when he composed the first 26 lines of the poem that he was conducting a heroic experiment, referring to “Paradise Lost” as “my advent’rous Song,” and going on to claim that here he is doing “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.”

Indeed, no previous Christian poet — not even Dante — had attempted to encompass the entire biblical narrative within a single poem, including the war in heaven that led to the expulsion of the rebel angels, the creation of the world and of Adam and Eve, the temptation of mankind, their eventual fall and the consequences of that fall for the future of the world. Furthermore, Milton announces, the great argument of his poem is intended to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.” By that he meant that he intends to show throughout his encyclopedic narrative how God’s dealing with mankind has been informed by divine justice, including the Pauline concept of justice that presupposes grace and mercy.

In order to tell this very big story, Milton audaciously creates an evolving narrator who seems designed to accompany the reader’s growing awareness and understanding, beginning with a naïve receptivity to the greatness of the fallen Satan, to a compassionate identification with Adam and Eve, to a receptivity to the lessons of the angels Gabriel and Michael, and on to the tragic catharsis of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. Milton turns the epic convention of starting his story in the middle into a psychological advantage in the sense that humanity is depicted as a late arrival (as in Genesis 2 and 3) in Creation. For that reason Milton’s reader is engaged as a co-creator of the story, so that we are expected to rearrange events as we witness them into the divine sequential order of God’s point of view.

Milton’s elegantly simple device for making this possible is to distinguish between three time schemes: the narrative present, the historical past, and the prophetic future. The narrator’s commentary and the speeches of the principal figures in the poem (Satan, Adam, Eve, etc.) take place in the poem’s dramatic present; Gabriel’s historical lessons to Adam and Eve are in the past tense; and Michael’s prophecies of what will be the future of mankind after they leave Paradise are in the future tense. The twelve episodes of what we might call the God-centered view of the events are these (the numbers in parentheses indicate the books of the poem in which the events occur):

The first epiphany of Christ, or, the generation of the son from the father (12); the second epiphany of Christ in his triumph after the three-day war in heaven (5-6); the establishment of the natural order in creation (7); the establishment of the human order in the creation of Adam and Eve (8); the epiphany of Satan and the generation of Sin and Death (1-2); the Fall of the human order (4/9); the fall of the natural order and the triumph of sin and death (10); the re-establishment of the natural order at the end of the flood (9); the re-establishment of the human order with the giving of the law (12); the third epiphany of Christ with the word as Gospel (12); the fourth epiphany of Christ in the Apocalypse or Last Judgment (12); the final unity when God shall be All in All (3).

That Milton in total blindness managed to construct such a complex poem, composing portions of it and then dictating them piece by piece, adds yet one more heroic element to his achievement. But when the final version of “Paradise Lost” was published in 1674, the cause of the English revolution to which Milton was devoted was long lost. The monarchy under King Charles II had been restored in 1660, and Milton died in 1674 not knowing if his great poem would ever find its audience. Indeed, that didn’t happen until 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution.

In his great “Life of Milton,” Samuel Johnson imagines Milton looking down on the “silent progress of his work, and marked his reputation stealing its way in a kind of subterraneous current through fear and silence” until “Paradise Lost” finally found an appreciative audience in 1688. Johnson couldn’t have foreseen that Milton would become a major inspiration to the first generation of English feminists at the time of the French Revolution (especially Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley) and to a whole tradition of African-American writers from Phillis Wheatley to Anna Julia Cooper.

n Michael Payne writes and lectures on literature and critical theory. He lives in Lewisburg and can be reached at payne@bucknell.edu.