The devil's advocate

Dr Johnson found him too lofty, TS Eliot said he wasn't serious enough, and today he is more admired than loved. But, 400 years after his birth, John Milton remains our most thrilling poet, argues Claire Tomalin, who has been in thrall to his verse since she was a teenager
Detail from anonymous portrait of John Milton
'He provokes arguments about power, good and evil, and the right to knowledge' ... John Milton National Portrait Gallery/PR

When I was invited by my publishers to choose any English poet for a "selected poems" I found myself saying, almost without a pause to think, "Milton". I confess I was surprised that they took the idea on board so readily. John Milton is a great name, but today he is not a popular poet. To me the early poems are sumptuous, the sonnets witty, magnificent and moving by turns, and Paradise Lost as thrilling as a novel. Yet I suspect that he does not fit easily into our age of performance poetry, and that he may be read less than he deserves to be. His reputation as a bad-tempered husband and father is held against him. But it seems to me that the man who emerges from the poems is a man possessed by natural and human beauty, by dreams, myths and legends, a man full of ideas that are sometimes in conflict with one another; who was prepared to give up his vocation as a poet for years in order to serve a political cause; and who overcame blindness to write his greatest work, full of exquisitely imagined scenes. However gnarled and crusty a man, he is a poet who commands attention.

He has been extolled, especially by other poets, and attacked by squads of critics. Dr Johnson found "gigantick loftiness" in the poetry; he complained of the want of human interest, and damned the sonnets with the line "of the best it can only be said that they are not bad". On the other side of the argument, he was praised by Blake, Wordsworth ("Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: /England hath need of thee . . .") and Hazlitt, who wrote of Milton's imagination melting down, "as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials". The Romantics admired the character of Satan, and Milton's landscapes became part of the cult of the picturesque. This did not stop the grumbling. He has been accused of weighing down the language, of producing poetry in which music predominates over sense, and Latinate words crowd out honest, straightforward English. TS Eliot and FR Leavis put their knives in deep. Eliot said that what Milton wrote was "not serious poetry", that his imagery was merely distracting, and much more. Leavis saw "looseness about meaning", "remoteness . . . from any English that was ever spoken", and indeed "callousness to the intrinsic nature of English". They have not gone unchallenged: Christopher Ricks's Milton's Grand Style, first published in 1963, must be not only the best defence and appreciation of Milton's poetry, but the most precisely illuminating.

Milton can be difficult, there is no doubt of that. He has high-flown sorties and syntax that asks for close attention (and rewards it), and his range of allusions is so far-flung that some of his poems need explanatory notes before they open up to the modern reader. In a few lines of his poem on melancholy, "Il Penseroso", for instance, he brings in Morpheus, the god of dreams; Memnon, an Ethiopian king who went to Troy and was killed there, and his sister Himera; the Ethiopian queen Cassiopeia, who was turned into a constellation to punish her for boasting that she was more beautiful than the sea nymphs known as the Nereids; and Vesta, the Roman goddess of hearth and home, traditionally a virgin, although Milton here makes her the mother of Cassiopeia by Saturn, her father, god of fertility and permissiveness, who presided over the holiday known as Saturnalia, from which our Christmas is derived. Even working your way through this with notes can feel like pushing through a nearly impenetrable bramble patch, fascinating as it is, and without notes you simply skip.

On the other hand, there is no difficulty at all about lines like these, at the end of the sonnet in which he describes a dream of his dead wife: "But O as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night." Nothing could be clearer, or simpler. And there is a surprise, even a shock in it, because the softly worded "O as to embrace me" invites you to expect a gentle follow-up, and instead comes a line of monosyllables like pistol shots. Even Shakespeare's sonnets sometimes slacken at the end, but this one rises to a climax, full of meaning and power.

And what about the lines in which he explains to a friend why he did not begrudge losing the sight of his eyes by working for Cromwell and his cause (he lost the sight of his left eye in 1648, worked on using his right eye, and became wholly blind in 1652):

. . . What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In liberty's defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask
Content though blind, had I no better guide.

A third example of plain, clear, unadorned wording comes in the closing lines of Paradise Lost, where he describes Adam and Eve driven out of paradise and making their way into the new, empty world before them:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Milton is suggesting how the couple's view of things has shifted. They have been punished by God for their disobedience, and cowered and grieved, but already they are looking forward to the world they can explore, and the choices they will be free to make - asserting their human resolve and comradeship, less like humiliated sinners than chastened yet proud, intelligent and courageous spirits.

In these three short passages, Milton appears as a personal and a political poet, packing meaning into short sentences, vivid and direct in the scenes he draws and the human exchanges he presents, talking in common words about the common experiences of grief and loss, pride and resignation.

Paradise Lost has held me in thrall ever since I first read it in my teens. I have reread it at irregular intervals, always with pleasure and renewed astonishment. I was no more a believer in the Christian myths when I first read it than I am now, but Milton sets out his version of the creation and the fall of man with such assurance and vigour, he invests the story with so much passion, the scope of his imagination is so wide, that the great structure of the poem carries you along with an irresistible momentum. Even the dim patches and the thinness of the figures of Jesus and God hardly slow you down. The vastness of the spaces through which his aerial beings move; the brilliant ambivalences of the villain who is Satan, soliloquising dramatically; the enchanted perspectives of paradise with its two freshly formed residents who busy themselves pruning roses, heaping up vegetarian meals for the entertainment of archangel visitors, and setting out the ground rules for marriage - none of this has any parallel in English poetry. Milton makes you think, provokes you into arguments about power, good and evil, about responsibility, innocence and the right to knowledge. He shows God forbidding this right, but we remember that Milton had himself defended it furiously in his essay on the freedom of the press, "Areopagitica". The clash between Milton the Renaissance humanist and Milton the faithful servant of God makes things interesting.

Paradise Lost was composed between 1658 and 1663, according to Milton's nephew, who was one of his helpers. These were black years for him. During 1658 came the death of Cromwell, his leader, employer and friend, in whose administration Milton had been an important and admired figure. The country was soon in turmoil, with different groups struggling to impose their ideas and plans, and drifting towards anarchy. In the same year, Milton's beloved second wife - the one in the dream - died. He was 50, and his domestic conditions became desolate: he was an authoritarian, unkind father to his three daughters and could not expect much warmth or care in return. During these months, the composition of his long-planned epic poem must have been the only encouraging part of his experience.

With the re-establishment of the monarchy in 1660 and the return of Charles II as king, to general rejoicing, things became still worse for Milton. He detested everything about the Restoration. He had written in favour of the execution of Charles I and approved the abolition of the bishops, who were reinstated with the monarchy. He knew he must be in danger, and for a time went into hiding. Parliament ordered his arrest, he was described as "a diabolical rebel", and some of his political books were publicly burned by the executioner at the Old Bailey. He escaped with his life through the intervention of a few who knew him and respected his work, but he was arrested, imprisoned and fined. On top of this, he also lost all his savings: poverty, blindness and discomfort were his lot.

Friends helped him, and he continued to compose. Milton allows himself three personal intrusions into the narrative of Paradise Lost. First, the passage in which he hails God not only as the creator of light, but as light itself, and goes on to mourn his blindness:

Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank . . .

Where earlier he had written proudly of giving his eyesight to the service of the cause of republicanism, he is closer to bitterness after the defeat of the cause. He had adored the physical world - the golden-tressèd sun, the dappled dawn, the month of May with its yellow cowslips and pale primroses, the bright eyes and curling hair of women, the "silver mantle" thrown over the night by the moon. Now he is cut off "from the cheerful ways of men", condemned to "a universal blank".

In the second and third personal interventions in Paradise Lost, he talks of how he has fallen on "evil days" and "evil tongues" and is surrounded by dangers, but in spite of this is able to receive his "celestial patroness" or, as he called her, his Christian muse, Urania. She comes to him sometimes early in the morning, sometimes in the night, when she "dictates to me slumb'ring, or inspires / Easy my unpremeditated verse."

The extraordinary claim that he takes his verses as dictation from a celestial being establishes his unshakable belief in himself against the disparagement of his enemies. Singled out from above in this way, he was all the same sensible enough to edit his heavenly Muse. After dictating what she had given him, and he had memorised, to one of the friends or assistants who came to write for him, he set about cutting extensively, and revising. Did he really believe in Urania and her night-time visits? No doubt he believed with one part of his mind. She may have hovered between allegory and symbol, among other inhabitants of his imagination, bright seraphim with angel trumpets, gloomy Dis who ruled the underworld, wood and mountain nymphs, Pan, Apollo and Robin Goodfellow. Her importance was that she allowed him to assert that his inspiration came straight from heaven.

One of Milton's characteristic effects is to collide Christian and pagan imagery and legend. Eve is compared to a wood-nymph in Diana's service. Raphael arrives in the garden of Eden like the god Mercury, shaking his plumes and giving out "Heavenly fragrance". And the garden itself is compared to:

that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers
Her self a fairer flower by gloomy
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world . . .

These have always been my favourite lines in Paradise Lost, with their astonishing leap out of the Christian and into a pagan world picture. Milton drew from Ovid, who describes how Proserpina, daughter of Ceres, the goddess of harvests, is carried off by Dis, the god of the underworld, from Enna in Sicily, and how Ceres searches for her and, failing to find her, consigns the world to perpetual winter until her daughter is restored to her; and his cross-cultural leap is accepted unhesitatingly by the reader of Paradise Lost, who also understands that Proserpina is seen as a version of Eve, another vulnerable and beautiful creature attacked by a hellish predator. Loss and sorrow are felt through all cultures in much the same way.

Milton wrote no other poetry while he worked on Paradise Lost. All his well-known shorter poems - "Lycidas", "L'Allegro", "Il Penseroso" among them - were written before he was 30, as was Comus. Only the sonnets continued, making punctuation points through the years of the civil wars and most of the interregnum, when he was otherwise producing only prose, and for several years working as Cromwell's Secretary for Foreign Tongues, dealing in Latin with correspondence with foreign states. The last sonnet coincided with the year of Cromwell's death. Each of the sonnets opens a window into Milton's life, sometimes acting for us almost like a diary entry. Some are comic, some formal eulogies, some intensely personal.

For example, "When the Assault was Intended to the City" was written in 1642 when the royalist army arrived in Brentford, threatening London. Milton was living in Aldersgate, working as a schoolmaster, and the sonnet reads like a gently humorous lesson in classical history, as Milton suggests that any army officer would do well to spare the house of a poet, citing the precedents of Alexander the Great, who spared Pindar's house, and the Spartan army, that spared Athens because Euripides lived there. Fortunately, no one attacked Milton's house, because the Earl of Essex and the London trained bands held Turnham Green for parliament and the royalists withdrew - but no doubt his pupils remembered the tales of Alexander and Pindar, the Spartans and Euripides.

He jokes more broadly in a sonnet of 1647, built around the unpromising name of one of his prose pamphlets, "Tetrachordon": the word means "four-stringed" and the pamphlet used four passages in the Bible to make its argument in favour of divorce, written during his long estrangement from his first wife. He soon realised that no one could cope with such a title, and mocked himself, using rhymes worthy of Byron. His pamphlet, although it "walked the town a while", was:

now seldom pored on.
A title-page is this! and some in file
Stand spelling false, while one might walk to Mile-End Green.

In 1652 came "When I consider how my light is spent", in which he admonishes himself to be patient while he works for the state, work that left him unable to use his "one talent" as a poet. This was also the year of the death of his first wife. No sonnet records this loss, but one is devoted to friendship and its pleasures: a young politician, Edward Lawrence MP, sometimes came to share a comfortable dinner by the fire with him on a winter's day, with good food and wine, and entertainment from a lute or a singer, and Milton evokes these occasions with Horatian relish.

In 1655 comes a roar of rage in "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont", inspired by an atrocity when the Catholic Duke of Savoy sent his troops to slaughter a peaceful and ancient community of mountain Protestants who were minding their own business. Cromwell made a complaint and sent an envoy and relief money, and Milton called on God to take further action:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones . . .

Splendid, although unavailing except to keep reminding us of the effects of religious bigotry.

The last of his sonnets, quoted in the first paragraph, is about his short-lived second wife. Milton explains that in his dream he fancies he can see her face, even though it is covered, and that he knows it is shining with love:

Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.

Again he is speaking directly of his experience and emotion.

What struck me most when making my selection of his poetry is the straightforwardness of so much of it. He is particularly good at endings: for example, to his early lines on old Hobson, who spent his life driving between Cambridge and London as the university carrier, before dying at 86. Milton the undergraduate imagines Hobson succumbing at a time when the plague in London has prevented him from driving, so that Death, finding him unoccupied at last:

Showed him his room where he must lodge that night,
Pulled off his boots, and took away the light:
If any ask for him, it shall be said,
Hobson has supped, and's newly gone to bed.

The picture given in the famous last couplet of "Lycidas", his elegy to a drowned college friend, is also perfectly clear:

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

And yet it is infinitely mysterious, too. Is "he" the supposed shepherd, the "uncouth swain" who has spoken the whole poem, and is now suddenly described, and shown about to depart? Or is it Milton himself, who in fact wrote the poem, and is turning away from poetry for reasons of his own, not given? Or are we meant to accept that "he" is a purely formal figure set within the strict conventions of pastoral poetry? Whatever Milton's intention, and whether it was set or fluid, the man who twitched his mantle blue is fixed forever for us - fixed, but on the point of departing, to those fresh woods, and pastures new. One part of Milton's greatness is that he never lets us forget that magic is a component of poetry.