Milton is the worst sort of poison,” declared the poet Ezra Pound in 1912. If you are not immediately sure who Milton is, or even what Pound means, then you are not alone: even Jenny Marx, wife of Karl, joked to her husband several decades previously, in 1875, that more Englishmen ate pork pies than read Paradise Lost, the shattering epic poem written by John Milton in 1667.
This magnificent opus, which tells the story of creation and of Satan’s dastardly revenge plan to destroy it, used to be recited by schoolchildren; now, one tends only to become acquainted with it during the course of an English literature degree. How far this canonical piece, which has at its centre the Christian foundational tale of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, has itself fallen. Yet if any work of Western literature can claim to have exerted the greatest influence, aside from the Bible, on successive generations of politicians, philosophers, writers and radicals, Paradise Lost is that work.
