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Wall Street Journal

A War Over Heaven and Hell

''Paradise Lost' is, surely, the greatest poem in English,' Alan Jacobs declares in his book on John Milton's masterpiece, 'but it is not lovable.' Few who know the poem would disagree with either assertion. Milton's epic is magnificent, potent and memorable on a scale unmatched in our literature. No other long poem approaches its intellectual scope and sustained genius. Yet no one praises 'Paradise Lost' without adding some cautionary qualification. Mr. Jacobs, a literary critic and professor at Baylor, has written a 'biography' of 'Paradise Lost': a concise, lively and learned account of the poem's creation and reception. This work is part of Princeton University Press's series on 'The Lives of Great Religious Books,' which gives Mr. Jacobs a complicated mission. He must spend more time discussing the poem's afterlife than its creation. He must also examine the poem's theological content more than its literary qualities. The author succeeds because he is both a literary historian and a serious Christian. Few critics find Milton's theology as simpatico as his poetry. For most readers, 'Paradise Lost' is too long, too difficult and too pious. Milton's epic is formidable—10,565 lines of dense and lofty verse divided by Milton into 12 substantial books. Even Milton's sentences are supersize; in the first book, one sentence goes on for 121 words, tumbling down the page in an avalanche of subordinate clauses. Samuel Johnson proclaimed 'Paradise Lost' a work of high genius but added slyly: 'None ever wished it longer than it is.' Milton's language is packed with classical, biblical and geographic allusions. He delighted in Latinate vocabulary and intellectual wordplay. Early readers, Mr. Jacobs reports, had such trouble construing the literal sense of Milton's verse that his publisher required him to write a prose paraphrase for each chapter.