Write an essay on Milton's style as revealed in Book 1, Paradise Lost.
How far is it correct to describe Milton's style as the grand style? Illustrate your answer from Book I of Paradise Lost.
Or
What are the main characteristics of Milton's style in Book I of Paradise Lost? Illustrate your answer.
Or
Discuss, with reference to Book I of Paradise Lost, the various elements which combine to form the grand style of Milton.
Milton's style in Paradise Lost has justly been described as the grand style. The grand style is one that, on account of the greatness of a conception, the exercise of a rich imagination, employment of dignified words arranged in an impressive and harmonious order, and the use of certain technical devices, produces an impression of bigness, or enormity. or vastness, or loftiness in the reader's mind. A critic attributes the grandeur of Milton's style in Paradise Lost to the following three ingredients: (1) use of slightly unfamiliar words and constructions. including archaisms; (2) use of proper names not solely or chiefly for their sound, but because they are the names of splendid, remote, terrible, voluptuous, or celebrated things; they are there to encourage a sweep of the reader's eye over the richness and variety of the world; and (3) continued allusion to all the sources of heightened interest in our sense experience (light, darkness, storm, flowers, jewels, sexual love, and the like), but all over-topped and "managed" with an air of magnanimous austerity. There is no doubt that, as will be seen in the course of this discussion, these three ingredients do enter largely into the making of Milton's grand style.
To take only one instance from Book I of Paradise Lost, we do not anywhere meet a more sublime description than the one in which Milton gives us a portrait of Satan with a dignity suiting the subject. This description contains a very bile picture which consists in images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutions of kingdoms. As we read this description, the mind is hurried out of itself by a crowd of great and confused images which are impressive because they are crowded and confused. If they were separated, much of the greatness would be lost. In this passage, indeed, we have a combination of various sources of the sublime: the principal object (that is. Satan) eminently great; a high superior nature, fallen indeed, but erecting itself against distress; the grandeur of the principal object heightened by associating it with so noble an idea as that of the sun suffering an eclipse; this picture shaded with all those images of change and trouble, of darkness and terror, which coincide so finely with the sublime emotion; and the whole expressed in a style and versification, easy. natural, and simple, but magnificent. Thus we see that there is a multiplicity and complexity of factors combining to produce the grand style. Other examples of the elevated, grand style in Book I are Satan's various speeches. Satan speaks always in a rhetorical, magniloquent manner which greatly impresses us and evokes our admiration.
It has to be pointed out that the grand style is far from a style based on the conversation of common people. We are not here dering with a style incorporating the natural, everyday speech, of ordinary people, as was subsequently demanded by Wordsworth. It is not-a colloquial style or the kind of style insisted upon by twentieth-century critics like T.S. Eliot. The grand style is completely divorced from the common speech of common people. As has already been indicated, it is a style that largely employs unfamiliar words and expressions. It is necessarily, therefore, a highly artificial style, though the word "artificial" here does not carry any condemnation or opprobrium. One of the most striking ingredients of this style is the long, complex, involved sentence in the labyrinths of which the reader may get lost, but which, when understood, produces in him an effect of wonder, amazement, and admiration. The very opening of Book I provides an illustration. We have in the first six lines of the poem the power and sublimity of what T.S. Eliot called "a breathless leap". Milton here achieves a loftiness of effect both by the word-order, which is especially firmly fixed in imperative sentences, by beginning with the genitive object ("Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden Tree") and inserting between it and the predicate a relative clause ("whose mortal taste brought death into the world") with various dependent elements ("and all our woe, with loss of Eden," etc.). This opening sentence is an example of what is known as "suspension". As Matthew Arnold pointed it, Milton did not let this sentence escape him till he had crowded into it all he could, so that the verb comes at the end of thirty-eight words. By thus withholding the verb so long, Milton is able to state in a heroic way the magnitude of the poem's subject and so the magnitude of his task. The word-order quite literally encompasses the huge theme. There are as many as twenty-three elaborate suspensions of one kind or another in Book 1. Of course, they do not occur in succession but alternate with unsuspended passages, The suspensions mark moments of emphatic meaning in the steady flow of the epic narrative as, for example, the opening of Satan's address to Beelzebub: "If thou beest he; but O how fall'n! how chang'.......In equal ruin." This structural aspect is an authentic feature of Milton's mode of expression and one which contributes more than any other single element to the elevation of his poetic style.
Another essential quality of Milton's style is its allusiveness. This quality, which also contributes to the elevation of style, consists of a rich suggestion of matters of observation in all realms of Nature and human experience. Milton explores all the treasures of poetry and learning for his allusions. Myth and legend, historical, literary, and scientific fact are all made use of. Classical and biblical allusions are to be found in abundance. Of no other English style is erudition so integral a part. To take only one example from Book I, Milton's comprehensive scholarship finds full play in the passage which compares the host of fallen angels to various military assemblages of heroic legend. That passage is a miniature survey. chronologically arranged, of the great conflicts which find mention in stories of heroism. Milton here mentions the wars of the gods and the Giants, the sieges of Troy and Thebes, the battles of King Arthur, the Crusades, and the wars of Charlemagne. Of course, we cannot escape noticing the fact that such vast comprehensiveness goes beyond the requirements of mere illustration. Nevertheless, an impression of grandeur and majesty is effectively created.
Then there are the similes. Milton's similes too go beyond the strict requirements of showing the similarity or the resemblance which initially prompts them. In Milton's hands, the similes develop into elaborate pictures, with the result that, in addition to the resemblance which is the central point of the simile, we are irresistibly driven to imagine a number of other things, some of them very remote from our actual experience. These similes too, then, inevitably contribute to the effect of the sublimity of style. The passage (describing Satan after his fall), already referred to contains three impressive similes, one of them going considerably beyond the illustrative requirements. Then there is the Leviathan simile which not only brings before us the vastness of Satan's dimensions but also suggests a falseness of appearances, the trickery to which Satan resorted, and the lack of caution on the part of Eve when communicating with the arch-fiend. The comparisons of Satan's legions with autumnal leaves, with the sea-weed floating on the waves, with the wrecked Egyptian army, with the swarm of locusts, and with northern barbarians not only convey the vast numbers of Satan's army, but also the confusion in which they lie, their diminished glory, and certain sinister implications. The abundance of such striking and effective epic or Homeric similes in Book I is astonishing. Even when Milton borrows a simile from his epic predecessors (the simile of the bees for instance), he adapts it to his own peculiar use.
One of the stylistic excellences of Milton is his use of proper names (that is, names of persons and places). The harmony, the concord, and the spell of such proper names have generally been recognised. (But here the appeal is to the initiated reader, not the novice). In Book 1, the entire catalogue of the devils is replete with such proper nouns-Moloch, Chemos, Baalim and Ashtaroth, Thammuz, Osiris, Isis. Belial, being only some of the names of pagan deities mentioned by Milton. The names of places and the names of rivers include Rabba, Argob, Arnon, Hinnom, Damascus, Abbana, and Pharphar. The range of these names (of gods and of places) is so wide and vast that an impression of comprehensiveness, immensity, and all-inclusiveness is inevitably produced. This is undoubtedly one of the sources of the sublime in Milton's verse.
Certain other ingredients of Milton's style may also be pointed out here:
1. Latinized construction. For example:
for never, since created Man,
Met such embodied force........
2. Use of words in their original Latin sense: "ruin". "horrid", "expatiate", "frequent".
3. Omission of words. For example, there is the omission of the article: "to pass Rhene"; of the verb: "cruel his eye": of the pronoun: "as whom the fables name"; and of the preposition: "fallen such a pernicious highth".
4. Inversion of adjectives: "dungeon horrible": "shapes immense".
5. Parenthesis and apposition: "Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams".
6. The use of one part of speech for another. Use of the verb form as noun: "beyond compare"; "the great consult"; the adjective form as noun: "for whose rebellious"; the noun for adjective: "their dread commander".
7. Unusual compound epithets similar to those in Homer: "night- foundered skiff; "bullion-dross".
It is worth mentioning that several 20th-century critics led by T.S. Eliot have attacked Milton's style. But Milton's style has found its apologists and admirers too in our times. For instance, the Latinisms (the Latin idioms and syntax and word-order) have been defended as devices for attaining in English something of the effect of the loaded line of Latin verse, which is a legitimate aim in a poem that deliberately emulates Virgil. It has also been said that many of Milton's Latinistic words do double service by reinforcing the English sense by the original meaning.
Finally, it must be admitted that Milton's style, whether attaining grandeur (or remote grandeur) or overwhelming us with its weight and sublimity, or not, has never been and never will be a "popular" style. It is a scholarly style and only scholars will appreciate or admire it. The average reader of poetry finds this style too heavy, cumbersome, and full of obscurities. It is impossible to understand Paradise Lost without copious annotations (even though some passages in it, like the celebrated speech of Satan on surveying the infernal regions in Book 1, are extremely lucid and written in a manner that charms us).
Important Questions with Answers
- Analyse and comment on the opening of Paradise Lost (Book I).
- What picture of Satan do you get from Book I of Paradise Lost?
- Discuss those traditional prescriptions of the epic from which are illustrated in Book I Paradise Lost.
- What purpose is served by the epic similes in Book I of Paradise Lost?
- On the basis of your reading of Book I of Paradise Lost, brig out Satan's qualities of leadership.
- What picture does Milton present of the angels in revolt?
- Analyse the speeches of Satan in Book I of Paradise Lost to show that Milton does not intend us to sympathies with Satan.
- "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". Discuss in the light of this remark some of speeches by Satan or statements made by the poet about him in Paradise Lost Book I.
- How is Milton's personality reflected in Paradise Lost, Book I?
- Write an essay on Milton's style as revealed Book I Paradise Lost.
- Explain how Milton's poetry weds the puritan spirit with that of the Renaissance.
- What is blank verse? Discuss Milton's handling of it in Book I of Paradise Lost.
