William Blake, John Milton (1800–1803); Manchester Art Gallery

In the Review’s June 9, 1966, issue, the literary critic Christopher Ricks wrote that John Milton is “the most controversial poet in English.” Since that early issue, considerations of Milton have found their way into our pages like a serpent into a garden, ranging from angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments among scholars to close-readings of his enigmatic verse.

In John K. Leonard’s review of How Milton Works by Stanley Fish, from our July 18, 2002, issue, the focus is less on the poetry and more on the methods with which academics have read Milton over the past century, particularly when interpreting Paradise Lost. This debate culminates, wrote Leonard, with Fish presenting John Milton’s work as “more dogmatic, more stonily uncompromising, than ever before.”

Attending more to the poet’s life than his work, in our February 26, 2009, issue—shortly after Milton’s four-hundredth birthday—Frank Kermode wrote about the many biographies of the man (alongside a new book, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?, about which Kermode observed, “The title is silly but it is fair to say that the book is not”). Come for the political pamphlets about regicide, stay for the divorce drama.

Mihály Munkácsy, Blind Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters (1877); The New York Public Library

Milton’s Paradise Lost has shaped much of the modern conception of the Garden of Eden—for example, it is credited with being the first time the serpent who tempts Eve is named as Satan. In our September 28, 2017, issue, Marina Warner wrote about The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Stephen Greenblatt’s book on “the vicissitudes that made the account of human origins told in Genesis 1–2 the preeminent one.” Warner found that the book offers a good overview of this mythology and noted:

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.

That tension between innocence and experience underlying the story of Adam and Eve animates much of what might otherwise seem like stodgy literary criticism. (It seems almost impossible to write about Milton without including William’s Blake’s famous assessment that he was “of the Devil’s party and didn’t know it.”) In our June 23, 2022, issue, Catherine Nicholson took up the deceptively simple task of elucidating “the unexpectedly interesting business of innocence…a central plank in Milton’s campaign to ‘justify the ways of God to men,’ and a significant innovation on his biblical source material.”

Nicholson’s second piece on Milton, in our March 27, 2025, issue, turned to Orlando Reade’s What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost, a book drawn from his time reading the poem with incarcerated students that traces the influence of Paradise Lost on political thinkers ranging from Hannah Arendt to C.L.R. James. Nicholson found the paradox at the heart of Milton’s work:

What is dark in Paradise Lost—its rage and disillusionment with the benighted masses, its misogyny, its totalitarian impulses and apocalyptic cravings—cannot be extricated from its generous, humane, and liberatory qualities, the splendor of its images, or the beauty of its verse.

—Lauren Kane

William Blake, detail from The Sun in His Wrath (1816–1820)

More on John Milton in The New York Review

Christopher Ricks
In Defense of Milton

“Milton ministers superbly to our need to comprehend how variously magnificent and strange the English language is, how finely it can communicate what we wish to say, how dextrously it can help us to discover what we wish to say. Milton’s mastery of language fortifies not merely our sense of what is beautiful, but our sense of what is human.”

—June 9, 1966

John K. Leonard
Did Milton Go to the Devil’s Party?

Before…1967 Milton’s admirers were divided into roughly two camps. One tradition, running from Addison to C.S. Lewis, held that Paradise Lost is a great poem because its justification of God is largely successful. A rival tradition, running from William Blake to William Empson, held that the poem is great because it expresses unconscious hostility toward God. Blake famously wrote that Milton was “a true poet & of the Devils party without knowing it.” Many have dismissed this comment as incorrigibly eccentric, but Blake and his successors enjoy one advantage over their critical adversaries. They can point for support to Milton’s political career.

—July 18, 2002

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 [in his Lives of the Poets] 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

Marina Warner
Legends of the Fall

“An impoverished, blind widower with three children, a marked man under the Restoration for his part in the Civil War, Milton again got remarried five years after Katherine’s death, to Betty Minshall, thirty years younger than he. It was during these last, beleaguered years that he dictated the epic Paradise Lost, inspired by a Muse whom he named Urania and who came to him in the night or in the early hours.”

—September 28, 2017

Catherine Nicholson
Improving Paradise

“The most fascinating and theologically knotty aspect of Milton’s unfallen world is that it allows innocence to coexist with improvement: Adam and Eve are made perfect—‘sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,’ in God’s preemptively defensive construction—but they are not thereby denied the pleasures of learning and growth, without which, Milton seems to believe, Paradise would be no paradise at all.”

—June 23, 2022

Catherine Nicholson
A Milton for All Seasons

“And Milton—pace Wordsworth, pace Blake—is on God’s side in the end. There is, from his perspective, a tragic grandeur in God’s predicament, burdened by awareness of all that is to come and bound by his own liberty-loving nature not to interfere: were it not for the Son’s self-sacrificing intervention, freedom would mean letting Satan win.”

—March 27, 2025

For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.

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