Style of John Milton| Paradise Lost| Book I

  Grandeur and sublimity is the essence of Milton's poetic style. It is almost uniquely literary and intellectual, freighted with learning and bookish phrases, elaborate in construction, and often alien in vocabulary, it achieves a unique effect of dignity and aloofness, and becomes a perfect medium for the restrained and elevated yet intensely passionate personality of its author.

Image of Satan| Britannica.com

John Milton Style in Paradise Lost

Analysing some features of Miltonic style, one notices frequent use of hyperbaton or inversion of natural order of words and phrases for a grand and impressive effect, e.g.

"There the companions of his fall, overwhelm'd

With floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous...

He soon discerns"

Then there are Latin constructions like 'Since created man', 'summons read' etc. archaism and Latinism in vocabulary ('frore', 'areed' , 'emprise' , 'nocent' , 'attrite' etc.);, ellipsis such as 'to pass Rhene', 'fallen such a pernicious highth'.

 Interchange of parts of speech: 'the great consult began' (verb used as noun) 'grinned horrible' (adjective used as adverb), 'dark with excessive bright' (adjective used as noun); striking oxymorons like 'darkness visible' and 'palpable obscure'.

John Milton style in Paradise Lost has a rich musical cadence. He is a master of alliteration ("under the conduct and in dreadful deeds") and onomatopoeia ("clashed on their sounding shields the din of war"). He also shows a fondness for collocations of more or less exotic proper names, e.g.

"...in Aspramont and Montalban

Damasco or Morocco or Trebisand..." 

And unusual compound-epithets analogous to those in Homer : 'nightwarbling bird', 'three-bolted thunder', 'double-founted streams' ete. One also comes across some instances of solemn punning :

"To have found themselves not lost/ In loss itself"

It is clear that Milton habitually resorts to an elevated diction and sentence structure as a means of removing his speech from the atmosphere of daily life to the lofty and sonorous realms of epic.

This end he achieves through two other means: allusiveness and use of epic similes; which form the body and soul of his poetic style. 

Allusiveness, in so far as it consists of a rich suggestion of matters of observation in the realm of nature and human experience, is a trait which Milton shares with many poets.

In the degree, however, to which his vision is coloured by experience of other men and simple observation modified by knowledge, he is almost unique. The whole treasury of poetry and the whole storehouse of learning are at his command.

He assumes that they are also at the command of his readers, and accordingly he loads every rift of his verse with the ore of myth and legend, historical, literary and scientific fact. Of no other English style is erudition so integral a part.

The scholarly habit of mind seeking order and comprehensiveness even in the heat of poetical inspiration, is well illustrated by the passage beginning though all the Giant brood/ Of Phlegra with the Heroic Race were joined', where he compares the Satan1C host to various military assemblages of legends and epics. 

It is a miniattlre survey, chronologically arranged, of the wars of the gods and giants (Hesiod)' the sieges of Troy and Thebes (Homer, Statius), the battles of Arthur (Geoffrey of Momouth), the crusades and the wars of Charlemagne (Italian Chivalric epic). Such comprehensiveness goes beyond the requirements of mere illustration.

But nothing is so remarkable about Milton's style as his use of similes 'A' proper estimate of these profusely rich, beautiful and grand similes is little short of impossibility.

He engages all his scholarly knowledge, aesthetic sensibility and multifarious experiences in the service of the similes, and the signal characteristic of his epic or expanded similes is that it does not stop with a single elaborate comparison, but proceeds from one to another.

Thus the multitude of Satan’s followers becomes,

 "... like that Pygmean race

Beyond the Indian mount, or faery elves

Whose midnight revels by forest side

Or fountain some belated peasant sees

Or dreams he sees..."

In John Milton's style in Paradise Lost thus often digresses from the main point of simlitude and introduces 'imagery which tend to distract us from the real subject'.

 Leavis comments that 'Miltonic similes do not focus one's perception or sharpen definition In any way.' But, seen in their complete associations most of them have wonderful signification. 

Paradoxically enough, Milton's poetry gains by the very vagueness and elaborate character of his images; and we have only to consider how Inuch Paradise Lost would lose by the deletion of such passages to be glad that Milton allowed himself this freedom.

In his choice of images Milton reveals himself as a true Elizabethan. From the Mount Ætna to the smallest bees, his imagination leaves out nothing.

And while Miltonic style has too often been criticised as exotic, ornate, artificial, 'a satin brocade, stiff with gold', he could also write lines essentially simple, full of poetic fervour and lucid beauty: 

"...from morn

 To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,

A Summer's day; and with the setting Sun

Dropt from zenith like a falling star

On Lemons th' Ægean ile."

Let us not forget that it is far more easy to point out some defects with a superficial view than to make a proper appreciation that would recognise the merits and yet would not exaggerate them.

 Grierson rightly said,

 "Nothing is more idle than to pass judgment on a poet's diction without strict attention to the purpose the poet had in view, the tone and atmosphere which it seemed to him the subject required."