The fall guy
Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother.
Break out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. Spit-roast the capon and prepare to party. Or, come to think of it, don’t bother. The fourth centenary of John Milton, which falls on 9 December, is unlikely to be greeted by an outburst of joyful carousing. Of all the great English writers (and he ranks among the half dozen greatest poets in all literature) Milton is the least cherished, the most lacking in glamour, the hardest to adore. His peculiar misfortune is to have been always out of fashion. In 1658 he began work on Paradise Lost, an epic celebrating the virtues of Christian fundamentalism just as the Puritans’ grip on power was slackening. The poem was published in 1667 amid the revelries of the Restoration and it sold a modest 1,500 copies during the author’s lifetime. He died in 1674, in poverty, his London house swallowed up by the Great Fire and his £2,000 in savings having disappeared with the Roundhead regime. The poem earned him just £10 in his lifetime.
Even its keenest supporters temper their praise with health warnings. Dr Johnson rated Milton alongside Homer and Virgil but admitted that the epic’s perusal was ‘a duty rather than a pleasure’. He added, unanswerably, ‘None ever wished it longer than it is.’ Charles Lamb laughed that ‘Milton requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him.’ Coleridge’s claim that the poem inspired ‘a deep sense of the grandeur and purity of Milton’s soul’ is bound to deter anyone who reads poetry for pleasure rather than from a desire to inspect the author’s spirit in all its elevated virtue.
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