I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by the con­cept of epic poet­ry, a lit­er­ary genre orig­i­nat­ing in the mists of pre-lit­er­ate soci­eties, when bards of the time would com­pose and mem­o­rise tra­di­tion­al sto­ries, and pass them on from per­former to per­former and per­former to audi­ence. The clas­sic epic poems that come down to us from ancient his­to­ry include the Epic of Gil­gamesh (com­posed any­where between 2500 and 1300 BC), Homer’s Ili­ad and Odyssey (8th cen­tu­ry BC), the Mahabara­ta (5th cen­tu­ry BC), and Virgil’s Aeneid (c.20 BC)…whilst from lat­er medieval and ear­ly Renais­sance years, we have the Old Eng­lish Beowulf, the Ger­man Nibelun­gen­lied, the French Song of Roland, Dan­te’s Divine Com­e­dy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and John Mil­ton’s Par­adise Lost. All of them mas­sive­ly sig­nif­i­cant in the his­to­ry of world lit­er­a­ture.

What these epic nar­ra­tive poems have in com­mon is great length (the Ili­ad con­tains over 15,000 verse lines; the Mahabara­ta a whop­ping 200,000!), fea­tur­ing vast set­tings and grand, sweep­ing themes, usu­al­ly fea­tur­ing a hero who par­tic­i­pates in a quest or jour­ney, per­forms great deeds, and gen­er­al­ly embod­ies the ide­al traits and moral val­ues of the nation or cul­ture from which the epic emanates. They also have in com­mon the con­straint of poet­ic meter, orig­i­nal­ly to help the bard recall the lines – in ancient Greek and Latin epic poet­ry it was dactylic hexa­m­e­ter that lent itself to the lan­guages (dum-di-di dum-di-di); in Renais­sance Eng­land, iambic pen­tame­ter (di-dum di-dum), beloved of Shake­speare of course.

John Milton’s Par­adise Lost may not have an obvi­ous hero (giv­en that his “heroes”, in his two main nar­ra­tive arcs, are Satan and Adam and Eve), but there’s no doubt­ing the grand theme: Mil­ton tack­les the epic saga of the Fall of Man, the temp­ta­tion of Adam and Eve by the fall­en angel Satan and their expul­sion from the Gar­den of Eden. Writ­ten across 10,000 lines of blank verse in iambic pen­tame­ter, Mil­ton starts in media res (anoth­er char­ac­ter­is­tic of the epic, mean­ing in the midst of the plot with the back­ground sto­ry being recount­ed lat­er) with Satan and the oth­er rebel angels defeat­ed and ban­ished to Hell.

The piece is a mon­u­men­tal and remark­able achieve­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en that by the late 1650s, when he start­ed writ­ing Par­adise Lost, Mil­ton had become blind and had to dic­tate the entire work to amanu­enses. Mil­ton saw him­self as the intel­lec­tu­al heir of Homer, Vir­gil, and Dante, and sought to cre­ate a work of art which ful­ly rep­re­sent­ed the most basic tenets of the Protes­tant faith. Like all epic poet­ry, with its length and archa­ic lan­guage, it’s a slog to read through (and I’m not rec­om­mend­ing it), but there’s no doubt­ing its influ­ence down the ages.

Here are the open­ing lines where Mil­ton lays out his inten­tions (to “jus­ti­fy the ways of God to men”):

Of man’s first dis­obe­di­ence, and the fruit
Of that for­bid­den tree, whose mor­tal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the bliss­ful seat,
Sing heav­en­ly muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shep­herd, who first taught the cho­sen seed,
In the begin­ning how the heav­ens and earth
Rose out of chaos: Or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the ora­cle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adven­tur­ous song,
That with no mid­dle flight intends to soar
Above the Aon­ian mount, while it pur­sues
Things unat­tempt­ed yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou Oh spir­it, that dost pre­fer
Before all tem­ples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know­est; thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings out­spread
Dove-like satst brood­ing on the vast abyss
And mad’st it preg­nant: What in me is dark
Illu­mine, what is low raise and sup­port;
That to the heighth of this great argu­ment
I may assert eter­nal prov­i­dence,
And jus­ti­fy the ways of God to men.