I keep having the sense that some truth in this cosmic Christian drama keeps asserting itself to Milton as poet which, as a theologian, he suppresses. I have no idea how much a close study of his published opinions or a deep penetration into his private thoughts could establish the truth I feel terminally baffled by the points I’m about to make. The deep matters they raise are too well guarded from over-easy access by their inherent difficulty to want the shield of obscurantism, while from imputations of heterodoxy there is really no protection its odor cannot be masked.Ĭonsequently I have a feeling, just a sense, that something much stranger than the double intention of a subtext runs through Paradise Lost: that Milton’s judgments denigrate what his representations magnify, that his characters contradict his condemnations and justifications. The purpose is to protect the author from misapprehension by ungifted, and from persecution by orthodox, readers.īut I don’t think great authors are often in that mode. Such occulted meanings are associated with esotericism, “insiderism,” the notion that the author speaks with a forked tongue-one text for the naively simpleminded, another for the initiable. So if an attentive reader discerns an under-meaning, there is in fact a subtext, a second probably more seriously meant meaning.
PARADISE LOST TRANSLATIONS HOW TO
Should it be called a hidden agenda, a subtext? On the supposition of trust-to which I warmly subscribe-what the words in a book say is what the author means it is simply the reasonable faith that the writer knows how to express himself. There seems to be a separate, opposed meaning. I keep having the sense that something is going on that runs right counter to the overt text. Partly its attraction is that it is insinuatingly suspect.
Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur and such human acuteness as may wean one-and has even weaned me-from a lifelong exclusive Homerophilia.
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