Alan Jacobs. Paradise Lost: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025. 224pp. ISBN 9780691238579. $24.95 hardback.

This is a very well-written short book, admirably produced by Princeton University Press, who are much to be commended in an age of declining standards of book production. Our collapsing academic presses in the Old World, notably those of Oxford and Cambridge, should take note. The author, Alan Jacobs of Baylor University, has an admirable grasp of Paradise Lost, as one would hope of an academic who reports that he has been teaching the poem for thirty-five years, and has read it more often than any other work of literature. The book is marketed as a “biography” of Paradise Lost, and this is to follow the exigencies of the series in which it has been placed. (Jacobs has also contributed a “biography” of the Book of Common Prayer to the same series.)

Were I writing the biography of a person I would assume that my task was to excavate the upbringing of and influences upon my subject, and then perhaps divide the life in question into stages. A modest final chapter would be called “legacy,” or something like that. This is not what we get here. First, we receive a summary biography of the poet himself, John Milton, in just over twenty pages. There follows a reading of Paradise Lost in fewer than forty pages, of necessity a piece of extreme compression and selection. The rest of the book is devoted to four chapters on the reception of Paradise Lost, divided into, roughly, pre-Romantic, Romantic, and twentieth-century reactions, and then a short final discussion of more modern reactions, or really just allusions, to Milton in non-textual media. So this is a miniature author biography, followed by a reading of a major poem, followed by some selective work in reception history. I am not quite sure that there is a sustainable analogy with real biography here, and I would have appreciated more explicit time taken to explain to the reader what kind of intervention is being offered, and for what audience. For me, a biography of a poem would be much heavier on causes, sources, and influences: what it is made of, rather than what it made.

But we all in our different ways must write to order, and so I now intend simply to take the book on its own merits, treating “biography” as a publisher’s steel hat, and no more. This short book, then, is really two even shorter books, and I shall address these in turn.

The first is the biography-with-summary-reading-of-Paradise-Lost. Only a carper at minutiae such as myself would query whether Milton “studied towards” the BD degree in the 1630s (12); and I am not confident we can say that Milton “gave up” (19) teaching shortly after his father’s death. But no matter: Jacobs has his biographical facts mainly straight, although I will return in a moment to the three biographies he has used.

Jacobs’s reading of Paradise Lost itself is in some ways a masterpiece of concision and sensitivity, but it does feel like a reading that solidified in a mid-twentieth century critical world and has not seen much cause to renovate itself. It is arranged into four “musical movements”: books 1-3 (Heaven and Hell: Andante, Presto); 4-8 (New World and Old: Allegro); 9 (the Great Tragedy: Largo maestoso); 10-12 (Aftermath: Andante). It seems a shame not to allow 9 and 10 (Fall and Recovery) to sound together, especially as Jacobs’s analysis picks up how well Eve behaves in Book 10 after the Fall, effectively showing Adam the way to repair their relations with God. No matter, again: there are many different and workable ways of parsing this epic; my own has been to describe the work as two nested fall epics with a battle epic and a creation epic further nested inside, linked to a final visionary appendix bringing the poem to the end of human time.

Jacobs is particularly strong on Adam and Eve, although I do want to offer one complication to his reading. When Eve “remember[s]” her creation to Adam in book 4, she famously describes, without knowing it, a scene resembling the myth of Narcissus: she falls in love with her own reflection in a pool. As Jacobs says, “Adam has to force her away from self-contemplation” (45), and into his arms. Well, true, and it is interesting to compare Adam’s slightly sanitised version of the same event when he recounts it to Raphael in book 8. But the more worrying problem, which Jacobs does not mention, is that God has to step in first, and take Eve from her pool to Adam, so it is not in fact Adam who is forcing her, but God himself: “there I had fixt / Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire, / Had not a voice thus warnd me” (4.465-67, my italics). I have always regarded this as one of the most interestingly creaky moments in the epic: Adam, created looking upright, vocal, certain of his God; Eve, created looking down at her own image, mute, and led away by the “voice” she cannot even yet identify with that of her maker.

I like a book that wears its supporting criticism lightly, but this one is almost as naked as Adam and Eve themselves. Miltonists do tend to get stuck in their own goldfish bowls, mouthing at one another as they pass, but when one browses the bibliography of this book, the lack of engagement with almost all modern book-length work on Milton starts to feel a little unkind. I can understand that some of the historicist classics would leave this author cold—so no Sharon Achinstein, no Thomas Corns, no David Loewenstein, no David Norbrook, for instance—but there are some critical heavyweights who should really get some attention in any book devoted to this poem. Where is John P. Rumrich’s Matter of Glory: A New Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1987) or Milton Unbound (1996), where is David Quint’s Inside ‘Paradise Lost’ (2014), and where is John Leonard’s classic Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (1990)? And as Jacobs is interested in Adam and Eve’s sexuality, where is James Grantham Turner’s One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (1987)? Given that this is a book mainly about reception history, to ignore the fundamental bible on that subject, Leonard’s Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970 (2013), borders on bad manners.

Jacobs has at least got hold of the three main biographies of Milton published in the last generation, those of Barbara Lewalski (2000), Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell (2008), and Nicholas McDowell (2020). But he might ponder the deeper polemical orientations of these landmark studies. Lewalski gave us the traditional Milton, in many ways, a Puritan in whom a particular kind of North American critic can engage with their own cultural roots. Old World Corns and Campbell somewhat mischievously overturned this Puritan Milton, the dominant note of all Miltonic biography since the poet’s death, by proposing that Milton was in fact a good little Laudian in his youth and early adulthood, was deeply suspicious of Puritans, and became swiftly and awkwardly radicalised following some clumsy state attacks on people he admired. McDowell in my view rightly found this too much of an overcorrection, but rather than returning us to the “hard Prot” Milton of traditional biography, McDowell proposed a Platonic, vatic, deeply individualist and aspirational Milton, who was all along focused on the sacred vocation of the poet, and not a pamphleteer who happened to write verse. I do think that any “biography” of Paradise Lost must be influenced by which one of these biographical versions of the poet himself seems most convincing, and I would have welcomed more adjudication on this fascinating question, all the more so because the author opens his discussion by agreeing that “the fate of this poem came to be intricately… intertwined with ideas about its author” (1).

Now this lack of critical mooring, as it were, would not really be a problem if Jacobs laid a clear course away from traditional ports of criticism and told us where he was going. Yet in fact it all remains very traditional, but with gaps. A book that deals with the reception of Milton should really engage with the Miltonic sublime more, for instance, as the vastness of Milton’s intricately planned and designed universe was what amazed many of his early readers. The Miltonic sublime is the subject of a brilliant recent book by Thomas Matthew Vozar (Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century (2023)). But what we might broadly refer to as Milton’s cosmology, astronomy, and physics is just dismissed: they “will find no place here” (30); and correspondingly there is no engagement with books such as Stephen M. Fallon’s Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (1991) or John Rogers’ The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (1996). Ah, I concluded, if not “Milton’s Universe” then perhaps we are dealing with a book on poetics or even versification? But, no, there is nothing on the technicality of the poetry, not even an appreciation of how and why Milton writes blank verse (for which see John Creaser, Milton and the Resources of the Line (2022)). So perhaps, finally, a book on Milton’s theology? The author is from a renowned Baptist foundation, and is clearly writing from the perspective of a student of belief. But then Jacobs excludes from consideration Milton’s Latin expression of his total theology, the De doctrina Christiana, as the poem “should be allowed to speak for itself” (29). I don’t see why the two can’t talk to one another, the premise of another Miltonic classic, Maurice Kelley’s This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s ‘De doctrina Christiana as a Gloss upon ‘Paradise Lost’ (1941), which, to be fair, is at least mentioned here.¹

Jacobs may legitimately wish to focus on the theology of the poem itself. But even so the pickings are slim. There are some fundamental and amazing things about the theology of this poem that need to be pinned to any critical mast. Let me state just five of them. 1) Milton’s God is an aggressive Arminian, to use the technical term: he and his God hammer the Calvinist positions on predestination and grace, for instance, in a manner that would have been outrageous in the 1620s and is still a bit strident in the 1660s, especially from someone of apparently “Puritan” background. 2) The start of the Rebellion in Heaven (following 5.600) introduces an intriguing circularity into the poem whereby Satan falls because of the promotion of a being (the “Son”) whose future career is to mitigate that precise fall. 3) Adam and Eve have sex before the Fall, and even Augustine was not able to countenance that. 4) The angels predate the Creation, and Chaos predates them; they too have sex. 5) God may have made the universe out of himself: there is no explicit creatio ex nihilo, which Milton indeed formally rejects in his Latin theology. And yet it has to be said that Jacobs doesn’t really engage with any of this. You will look in vain, for instance, for any wider discussion of an Arminian versus a Calvinist set of positions on questions about determinism and the freedom of the will in the epic, and that is a pity, because that is a key part of its physiognomy, and a “biographer” can’t just pass it by.

The second part of this book, on reception, suffers from over-compression: canonical authors whizz by like slides in a lecture—as they perhaps were. Near-contemporary reception—it is a shame the author did not start with the ambiguities of Andrew Marvell’s poem on Milton—treads the path of duellist Dryden, explicatory Addison, jealous Johnson, with a tiny coda on crazy Cowper. The reading of the Romantics follows a similar “Critical Heritage” path padded out with Wikipedia-esque thumbnail biographies: Blake, whose indulgent misreadings of Milton are merely patted like the paunch of a friendly dog without serious evaluation; the tedious Wordsworth, whose Prelude is nicely characterised here as merely an “evasion” (96) rather than an engagement with its Miltonic parent; then the obligatory Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelleys axis, with all the underperforming narcissism we associate with these figures. (The Marys come out of this best, as usual.) But, despite the fine prose, there is no effort to rethink these classic lines, and the result feels like it pulls back, rather than forwards, in critical history. Couldn’t we even have a bit of Hazlitt to vary the diet, if we must do this by Great Figures?

The next chapter, “Proxy Wars,” shifts bearing into the land of the critics. Here the great highlight is Jacobs’ treatment of William Empson, whose Milton’s God (1961) argued with brilliant perversity that Milton’s God as presented is an awful bully: “the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions” (145). This gave critical body to Blake’s initially absurd-looking line on Milton being of the devil’s party: Empson’s achievement was to show how the astonishing moral honesty of the poem yoked to the incessant logic of its theological explorations produced a text that ended up incriminating the ideology it had hoped to defend. I suspect Jacobs doesn’t agree with this, to put it mildly, but his exposition is a superb example of taking your enemy seriously. Yet Jacobs is not really willing to go in for the kill. He explains, but he does not judge enough. Can we not say that Empson was brilliant, but also brilliantly wrong, and that one of the greatest editorial achievements of the twentieth century, namely the 1968 edition of the poem by Alistair Fowler, was so precisely because in its commentary Fowler refuted Empson on his own grounds? Empson hated the idea of God, put Milton between them, and pounded the intermediary.

This problem to my mind also affects the reading here of Stanley Fish, whose Surprised by Sin (1967) transformed ideas of reading by arguing that, far from being caught in theological tangles too powerful to untangle, Milton was “harassing” the reader with what Milton pig-headedly regarded as a complete and coherent system, inviting the reader to fail, and fail better, until the lesson had been learnt. This was exhilarating stuff, but it did suffer from the twin problems that early readers just didn’t behave like this, and that Milton’s internal complexity is belittled if reduced to an apparently unambiguous system: Fish’s ideal reader was a historical fiction, and if replicated in the modern world would rightly be dismissed as a cloth-eared bore. But it was a powerful book, alas followed by steadily declining work from Fish, whose last works on Milton, such as How Milton Works (2001), were bricolages of earlier writings, offering only repetition and increasing critical banality. We have to be able to say this, and yet Jacobs once again stops short of making any judgement on this critical trajectory. This does make his book, finally, a little more vanilla than curry.

This may be, as I suggested, because the book is a distillation of a liberal arts undergraduate course on a Great Book—who wrote it, what happens in it, and what some people said about it. An admirable educational goal; but it does mean that the audience for this book is not a scholarly one. Even granting, however, that this is not a book aimed at the carping Miltonist goldfish, I felt that Jacobs would have been happier in his conclusions had he set out his own views more forcefully. I had hoped for some stridency, even, from a theological authority: the poem remains theologically relevant, say, and the misreadings of both young Empson and old Fish need to be exposed as such, and seen off. Extensive quotation will also not substitute for close reading, and the reader is not really helped to the conviction that this is some of the best verse in the English language. Milton was very keen on educating his readers, as Jacobs amply explains in his able analysis of the tedious Fish. Jacobs himself, by that token, might have aimed to court a higher grade of reader, for he certainly has the warm prose and the rich insight, if perhaps not the hard Miltonic subjection to scholarship, to do so.

William Poole

Oxford University