Questions: Milton's Paradise Lost and the Literary Epic

Question 1

Paradise Lost opens with Satan and his followers lying in Hell after their defeat, and the war in Heaven is told later by the angel Raphael. Which epic convention is this?

• A. Epic catalogue
• B. Beginning in medias res
• C. Epic simile
• D. Deus ex machina

Answer: (B)

Beginning in medias res, 'in the middle of things,' is a convention Milton takes from Homer and Virgil. The earlier events are filled in by later narration, as Raphael does in Books 5 and 6.

Question 2

Paradise Lost is written in rhymed heroic couplets, the dominant form for serious English verse in the 1660s.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Milton chose blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter. Rhymed couplets were fashionable in Restoration verse drama, which is one reason Milton added a defence of his unrhymed measure in 1668.

Question 3

What purpose does Milton announce for the poem in its opening invocation?

• A. To celebrate the founding of a nation
• B. To 'justify the ways of God to men'
• C. To mock the pretensions of epic poetry
• D. To record the history of the English Civil War

Answer: (B)

Milton asks the 'Heav'nly Muse' to help him 'assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.' A national founding is Virgil's subject in the Aeneid, and mocking epic is the work of mock-epic such as Pope's The Rape of the Lock.

Question 4

William Blake wrote that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it.' Give one reason readers have agreed and one reason others have disagreed.

Model answer: Agree: Satan's early speeches, such as 'Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n,' are energetic and defiant, and the poem gives him great dramatic force. Disagree: the poem shows his arguments as self-serving and traces his decline, so the reader's attraction to him may be part of the poem's lesson about temptation.

Blake's remark (in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, c. 1790-93) launched the Romantic reading of Satan as rebel hero. Other critics, such as Stanley Fish in Surprised by Sin (1967), argue that the poem deliberately tempts readers and then makes them recognize their error.