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In our March 27 issue, Catherine Nicholson writes about Paradise Lost and the many readings, interpretations, and rereadings that have sustained John Milton’s epic poem for nearly four hundred years. People as far apart in time and disposition as William Blake and Malcolm X, or John Adams and Virginia Woolf, “have found in Milton’s vision of fallen human nature fodder for conservatism, cautious liberalism, nihilism, or outright authoritarianism,” usually depending on how they choose to understand his depiction of Satan.

But, Nicholson contends, “inarguably, the right reading of Paradise Lost” takes God’s side: “The powers that work for freedom are necessarily divine; Satan and his followers are merely thwarted imperialists.” After all, “true liberty entails the freedom to be wrong.”

Below, alongside Nicholson’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Milton and Paradise Lost.

Catherine Nicholson
A Milton for All Seasons

The many radical rereadings of Paradise Lost

Catherine Nicholson
Improving Paradise

“Of the many liberties John Milton took in writing Paradise Lost, his 1667 epic poem on Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, the most delightful and underrated are his efforts to imagine daily life in Paradise before the Fall.”

—June 23, 2022

Marina Warner
Legends of the Fall

“It was John Milton, the regicide republican and Puritan, poet and activist, who unashamedly evoked the glorious tenderness and delight of sex for Adam and Eve before the Fall—and imagined angels doing it as well—in a richly intricate language that clothes the laconic Bible narrative in lavishly sensuous imagery, sinuous syntax, and intimate intensity.”

—September 28, 2017

Frank Kermode
Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday

“Milton, as a young man beautiful as well as clever, had a good if pious opinion of himself. He appended dates to his juvenile Latin compositions, and [Samuel] Johnson sneers at him for the vanity of his desire to prove his ‘vernal fertility.’ Yet he recognizes Milton as the first Englishman to write Latin verses ‘with classick elegance.’”

—February 26, 2009

Quentin Skinner
Milton, Satan, and Subversion

“Milton was also a defender of polygamy and divorce. He spoke of ‘the liberty, not unnatural, to have many wives.’ And he caused a sensation in 1644 by publishing a tract in which he pleaded for a ‘tender mercy’ to be shown to those who (like himself) had ‘made themselves the bondmen of a luckless and helpless matrimony.’”

—March 23, 1978

Christopher Ricks
In Defense of Milton

What is more immediately true of Milton is that he leaves his readers no choice but to commit themselves with their minds and hearts. To stand up and be counted—all the more important when so much poetry leaves us “stretched on the rack of a too easy chair.”

—June 9, 1966

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