Chapter I: Epic Poetry

The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship is to know what it is – what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. …This need is specially urgent in the present age because the kind of poem Milton meant to write is unfamiliar to many readers. He is writing epic poetry which is a species of narrative poetry. …Our study of Milton’s epic must therefore begin with a study of epic general….The first question he asked himself was not ‘What do I want to say?’ but ‘What kind of poem do I want to make?’…The parallel is not to be found in a modern author considering what his unique message is and what unique idiom will best convey it, but rather in a gardener asking whether he will make a rockery or a tennis court. …The things between which choice is to be made already exist in their own right, each with a character of its own well established in the public world and governed by its own laws. If you choose one, you lose the specific beauties and delights of the other: for your aim is not mere excellence, but the excellence proper to the thing chose…. Every poem can be considered in two ways – as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes…Another way of stating this duality would be to say that every poem has two parents – its mother being the mass of experience, thought, and the like, inside the poet, and its father the pre-existing Form…The matter inside the poet wants the Form: in submitting to the Form it becomes really original, really the origin of great work. The attempt to be oneself often brings out only the more conscious and superficial parts of a man’s mind; working to produce a given kind of poem which will present a given theme as justly, delightfully, and lucidly as possible, he is more likely to bring out all that was really in him, and much of which he himself had no suspicion.

Chapter II: Is Criticism Possible?

{Lewis demonstrates that one doesn’t need to be a great poet in order to evaluate poetry.}

Chapter III: Primary Epic

{Lewis describes the roots of epic using The Iliad and Beowulf as examples. Such poetry was court poetry, marked by tragic quality, by supposed historical truth, and by gravity, solemnity.} [The Middle English word solempne] implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike solemn it does not suggest gloom, oppression, or austerity. …The Solempne is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for pomp…To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them…The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual….Our first picture of the epic poet needs to be modified by the associations of incense, sacrifice, civic pride, and public holiday.

Chapter IV: The Technique of Primary Epic

The most obvious characteristic of an oral technique is its continual use of stock words, phrases, or even whole lines. …Consider what these repetitions do for the hearers, not what they do for the poet. …It is a prime necessity of oral poetry that the hearers should not be surprised too often, or too much. The unexpected tires us…it also takes us longer to understand and enjoy than the expected. A line which gives the listener pause is a disaster in oral poetry because it makes him lose the next line…the poetry is in the paragraph, or the whole episode. To look for single, ‘good’ lines is like looking for single ‘good’ stones in a cathedral. The language, therefore, must be familiar in the sense of being expected. But in Epic which is the highest species or oral court poetry, it must not be familiar in the sense of being colloquial or commonplace. The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one. We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not. ….What is the point of having a poet inspired by the Muse, if he tells the stories just as you or I would have told them? It will be seen that these two demands, taken together, absolutely necessitate a Poetic Diction; that is, a language which is familiar because it is used in every part of every poem, but unfamiliar because it is not used outside poetry. …Epic diction, Christmas fare, and the liturgy, are all examples of ritual – that is, or something set deliberately apart from daily usage, but wholly familiar within its own sphere. [Ritual] is a pattern imposed on the mere flux of our feeling, by reason and will, which renders pleasures less fugitive and griefs more endurable, which hands over to the power of wise custom the task (to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate) of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be, and not at the bidding of chance.

Chapter V: The Subject of Primary Epic

{The subject matter of primary epic differed in scope from that of secondary epic, which grew from primary, but dealt with broader themes. Virgil was the one to introduce this use of greater subject in his Aenid, thus marking the breaking point between primary and secondary epic.} Primary Epic simply wants a heroic story and cares nothing about a ‘great national subject’… The fall of Virgil’s Troy is a catastrophe, the end of an epoch. …For Homer it is all in the day’s work. …Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux.

Chapter VI: Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic

The epic subject…is Virgil’s invention; he has altered the very meaning of the word epic. If we are to have another epic it must go on from Virgil. Any return to the merely heroic, any lay, however good, that tells merely of brave men fighting to save their lives or to get home or to avenge their kinsmen, will now be an anachronism. {Previous Latin epics had been historical chronicles of progress and development over time, whereas the Greeks had seen time as mere flux.} [Virgil’s contribution,] -one of the most important revolutions in the history of poetry – was to take one single national legend and treat it in such a way that we feel the vaster theme to be somehow implicit in it. He has to tell a comparatively short story and give us the illusion of having lived through a great space of time. He has to deal with a limited number of personages and make us feel as if national, or almost cosmic, issues are involved.

Chapter VII: The Style of Secondary Epic

The style of Virgil and Milton arises as the solution of a very definite problem. The Secondary epic aims at an even higher solemnity than the Primary, but it has lost all those external aids to solemnity which the Primary enjoyed. …The sheer writing of the poem, therefore, must now do, of itself, what the whole occasion helped to do for Homer. The Virgilian and Miltonic style is there to compensate for – to counteract – the privacy and informality of silent reading in a man’s own study. …To blame it for being ritualistic or incantatory, for lacking intimacy or the speaking voice, is to blame it for being just what it intends to be and ought to be….This effect is achieved by what is called the ‘grandeur’ or ‘elevation’ of the style {use of unfamiliar words, use of proper names, continued allusion to sources of sense experience}. What I chiefly want to point out is…the poet’s unremitting manipulation of his readers – how he sweeps us along as though we were attending an actual recitation and nowhere allows us to settle down and luxuriate on any one line or paragraph. …Continuity is an essential of the epic style …we must not be allowed to settle down at the end of each sentence. Even the fuller pause at the end of a paragraph must be felt as we feel the pause in a piece of music, where the silence is part of the music, and not as we feel the pause between one item of a concert and the next. …A boat will not answer to the rudder unless it is in motion; the poet can work upon us only as long as we are kept on the move. ….But by (Milton’s) appearance of an extremely carpentered structure he avoids the suggestion of fever, preserves the sense of dignity, and does not irritate the mind to ask questions.

Chapter VIII: Defence of This Style

…poetry aims at producing something more like vision than it is like action. But vision, in this sense, includes passions. Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all. …in poetry passion is present for the sake of…the rightness and richness of a man’s total response to the world. {In other words, Milton doesn’t just show, he manipulates our reaction to what we are shown so that we see it more truly. Lewis distinguishes this from the manipulative use of passion in rhetorical speech, which is geared toward getting us to act a certain way.} …By a Stock Response,[we] mean a deliberately organized attitude which is substituted for the ‘direct free play of experience’. In my opinion such deliberate organization is one of the first necessities of human life, and one of the main functions of art is to assist it. All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or, in general, as perseverance – all solid virtue and stable pleasure – depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux of mere immediate experience. …To me, it seems that most people’s responses are not ‘stock’ enough, and that the play of experience is too free and too direct in most of us for safety or happiness or human dignity. …A belief [is held] that a certain elementary rectitude of human response is ‘given’ by nature herself, and may be taken for granted, so that poets, secure of this basis are free to devote themselves to the more advanced work of teaching us ever finer and finer discrimination. I believe this to be a dangerous delusion. Children like dabbling in dirt; they have to be taught the stock response to it. …The Stock response to Pride, which Milton reckoned on when he delineated his Satan, has been decaying ever since the Romantic Movement began {also the responses to treachery, death, pain}. That elementary rectitude of human response, ….so far from being ‘given’ is a delicate balance of trained habits, laboriously acquired and easily lost, on the maintenance of which depend both our virtues and our pleasures and even, perhaps, the survival of our species …poetry was formerly one of the chief means whereby each new generation learned, not to copy, but by copying to make, the good Stock responses. {For example: death is bitter, love is sweet, virtue lovely} [Milton’s] style is not pretending to be ‘natural’ any more than a singer is pretending to talk. …The grandeur which the poet assumes in his poetic capacity should not arouse hostile reactions. It is for our benefit. He makes his epic a rite so that we may share it; the more ritual it becomes, the more we are elevated to the rank of participant. …we are summoned…to take part in a great mimetic dance of all Christendom, ourselves soaring and ruining from Heaven, ourselves enacting Hell and Paradise, the Fall and the repentance. …when we are caught up into the experience which a ‘grand’ style communicates, we are, in a sense, no longer conscious of the style. Incense is consumed by being used.

Chapter IX: The Doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart

{Lewis considers the ‘doctrine of the unchanging human heart’, a method of looking at the poetry of a past time and stripping away all that is different between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to get to whatever is of permanent and human interest. He speaks particularly to those who would try to disentangle Milton’s poem from his theology.} Fortunately there is a better way. Instead of stripping the knight of his armour you can try to put his armour on yourself; …It is better to study the changes in which the being of the Human Heart largely consists than to amuse ourselves with fictions about its immutability. For the truth is that when you have stripped off what the human heart actually was in this or that culture, you are left with a miserable abstraction totally unlike the life really lived by any human being. …Milton’s thought, when purged of its theology, does not exist. Our plan must be very different – to plunge right into the ‘rubbish’, to see the world as if we believed it, and the, while we still hold that position in our imagination, to see what sort of a poem results.

Chapter X: Milton and St. Augustine

{By studying St. Augustine’s version of the Fall story, we understand the poem better and avoid} false emphases to which modern readers are liable. {Lewis gives ten points of doctrine held by Milton, Augustine, and the Church as a whole, which must be understood in order to fully understand Paradise Lost.} 1) God created all things good…2)…bad things are good things perverted…3) …it follows that …good can exist without evil, but not evil without good…and that good and bad angels have the same Nature, happy when it adheres to God and miserable when it adheres to itself…4)…God foreknows that some will voluntarily make themselves bad and also foreknows the good use which He will then make of their badness…5)…If there had been no Fall, the human race…would have been promoted to angelic status…6)…Satan attacked Eve rather than Adam…7)…Adam was not deceived, …but yielded because of the social bond between them…8)…the Fall consisted in Disobedience…the idea that the apple has any intrinsic importance is put into the mouths of bad characters 9)…the Fall resulted…from Pride….10)…it was punished by man’s loss of Authority over his inferiors; that is, chiefly, over his passions and his physical organism

Chapter XI: Hierarchy

{Failure to understand what Lewis calls the ‘hierarchical conception’ results in false criticism of Paradise Lost.} According to this conception, degrees of value are objectively present in the universe. Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior. The goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superiors and ruling its natural inferiors. …order can be destroyed in two ways: (1) By ruling or obeying natural equals, that is by Tyranny or Servility. (2) By failing to obey a natural superior or to rule a natural inferior – that is , by Rebellion or Remissness… The idea, therefore, that there is any logical inconsistency, or even any emotional disharmony, in asserting the monarchy of God…is a confusion….this is perhaps the central paradox of [Milton’s] vision. Discipline, while the world is yet unfallen, exists for the sake of what seems its very opposite – for freedom, almost for extravagance. ….The heavenly frolic arises from an orchestra which is in tune; the rules of courtesy make perfect ease and freedom possible between those who obey them. Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.

Chapter XII: The Theology of Paradise Lost

{Lewis counters charges of heresy in Paradise Lost}

Chapter XIII: Satan

…the proposition that Milton’s Satan is a magnificent character may bear two senses…a magnificent poetical achievement…or…an object of admiration and sympathy. [Milton] believed everything detestable to be, in the long run, also ridiculous; and mere Christianity commits every Christian to believing that ‘the Devil is (in the long run) an ass’. …No one had in fact done anything to Satan; he was not hungry, nor over-tasked, nor removed from his place, nor shunned, nor hated – he only thought himself impaired…Hence his revolt is entangled in contradictions from the very outset. [Satan’s rebellion] means Nonsense for the intellect….Satan attempts to maintain the heresy…that he is a self-existent being…What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything…Milton…was relying on two predispositions in the minds of his readers, which in that age, would have guarded them from our later misunderstanding. Men still believed that there really was such a person as Satan, and that he was a liar. The poet did not foresee that his work would one day meet the disarming simplicity of critics who take for gospel things said by the father of falsehood in public speeches to his troops. …all that is said about Milton’s ‘sympathy’ with Satan, his expression in Satan of his own pride, malice, folly, misery, and lust, is true in a sense, …The Satan in Milton enables him to draw the character well just as the Satan in us enables us to receive it. …Milton expected all readers to perceive that in the long run either the Satanic predicament or else the delighted obedience of Messiah, of Abdiel, of Adam, and of Eve, must be their own….To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.

Chapter XIV: Satan’s Followers

{Regarding the debate between Satan’s followers about their plan of action: } …the aesthetic value of every speech in this debate partly depends on its moral significance, and that this moral significance cannot easily be exhibited without indicating those situations in human life which resemble the situation of the devils in Pandemonium. They resemble it not because Milton is writing an allegory, but because he is describing the very root from which these human situations grow. …the way out that occurs to [Moloch] is rage. It is a way out which often occurs to human beings in a similar position. If the knowledge that we have betrayed what we valued most is unbearable, perhaps furious enmity against it will drown the knowledge….Belial’s [policy] is less obvious – to be very, very quiet, to do nothing that might release the fierce energies of Hell, and to hope that we shall presently grow more or less used to it….Mammon goes one better…He believes that Hell can be made into a substitute for Heaven…The human analogues are here the most obvious and the most terrible of all – the men who seem to have passed from Heaven to Hell and can’t see the difference. ….Beelzebub [recalls them to the reality]…that they cannot at all escape from Hell nor in any way injure their enemy, but that there is a chance of injuring someone else….such is Milton’s invention that each new speaker uncovers further recesses of misery and evil, new subterfuge and new folly, and gives us fuller understanding of the Satanic predicament.

Chapter XV: The Mistake About Milton’s Angels

{Milton would have believed, as true, the ‘Platonic theology’ of angelic beings having corporal reality. His depiction of angels is not, in his mind or the minds of his original audience, a ‘poetic fiction’, but rather a } literally true picture of what they probably were according to the up-to-date pneumatology of his century. …I hope it will not be supposed that I am prepared to support Milton’s angelology as science, if I suggest that it improves poetically when we realize that it is seriously intended – even scientifically intended. ….The whole point of view changes if we suppose ourselves coming to the work with a belief in such theories of the aereal body already formed and curious to see whether the poet will evade such details or triumphantly bring them I without becoming prosaic.

Chapter XVI: Adam and Eve

I had come to the poem associating innocence with childishness. I had also an evolutionary background which led me to think of early men, and therefore a fortiori of the first men, as savages. The beauty I expected in Adam and Eve was that of the primitive, the unsophisticated, the naïf. ….The whole point about Adam and Eve is that, as they would never, but for sin, have been old, so they were never young, never immature or undeveloped. The were created full-grown and perfect….Adam was, from the first, a man in knowledge as well as in stature….The task of a Christian poet presenting the unfallen first of men is not that of recovering the freshness and simplicity of mere nature, but of drawing someone who, in his solitude and nakedness, shall really be what Soloman and…Louis XIV lamely and unsuccessfully strove to imitate on thrones of ivory between lanes of drawn swords and under jeweled baldachins…..Adam’s kingly manner is the outward expression of his supernatural kingship of earth and his wisdom. ….In considering his relations with Eve we must constantly remind ourselves of the greatness of both personages. Their life together is ceremonial – a minuet, where the modern reader looked for a romp. ….[Eve’s] humility is often misunderstood…..We see her prostrate herself in spirit before Adam –as an Emperor might kneel to a Pope or as a Queen curtsies to a King. You must not think but that if you and I could enter Milton’s Eden and meet her we should very quickly be taught what it is to speak to the ‘universal Dame’.

Chapter XVII: Unfallen Sexuality

{Lewis discusses the difficulties Milton face in representing unfallen sexuality, and whether it was wise to attempt it.}

Chapter XVIII: The Fall

Eve fell through Pride. The serpent tells her first that she is very beautiful, and then that all living things are gazing at her and adoring her. Next he begins to make her ‘feel herself impaired.’ Her beauty lacks spectators…..The results of her fall begin at once. She thinks that earth is a long way from Heaven and God may not have seen her; the doom of Nonsense is already at work. …..But presently she remembers that the fruit may, after all, be deadly. She decides that if she is to die, Adam must die with her….I am not sure that critics always notice the precise sin which Eve is now committing, yet there is no mystery about it. Its name in English is Murder. …The whole thing is so quick, each new element of folly, malice, and corruption enters so unobtrusively, so naturally, that it is hard to realize we have been watching the genesis of murder. …She has still a further descent to make. Before leaving the Tree she does ‘low reverence’ before it ‘as to the power that dwelt within’, and thus completes the parallel between her fall and Satan’s. She who thought it beneath her dignity to bow to Adam or to God, now worships a vegetable. She has at last become ‘primitive’ in the popular sense. …The effects of the Fall on [Adam] are quite unlike its effects on the woman. She had rushed at once into false sentiment which made murder itself appear a proof of fine sensibility. Adam, after eating the fruit, goes in the opposite* direction….Eve is becoming to him a thing. {*She makes of herself a dramatic heroine, larger than life. Adam makes of her an object, diminishing her.}

Chapter XIX: Conclusion

[Paradise Lost] has been compared to the great wall of China, and the comparison is good: both are among the wonders of the world and both divide the tilled fields and cities of an ancient culture from the barbarians. We have only to add that the wall is necessarily hated by those who see it from the wrong side, and the parallel is complete. ...Some are outside the Wall {hating Paradise Lost} because they are barbarians who cannot get in; but others have gone out beyond it of their own will in order to fast and pray in the wilderness. ‘Civilization’ – by which I here mean barbarism made strong and luxurious by mechanical power – hates civility from below; sanctity rebukes it from above. ….As long as we live in merry middle earth it is necessary to have middle things. If the round table is abolished, for every one who rises to the level of Galahad, a hundred will drop plumb down to that of Mordred.