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.
