Paradise Lost has not one style but several, as Pope was among the first to recognise. There is, at the simplest level of discrimination, an infernal style, a celestial style, and styles for Paradise before and after the fall. But the infernal style itself differs both mechanically and actually, in the heroic preparations of the first book, in the “great consult” in Pandemonium and in Satan's encounter with Sin and Death. The other styles reveal similar and substantial differences of application. In these circumstances it may seem irrelevant to talk of the poem's style at all, but the word, though deceptive, is not wholly beside the point. With all its variations, the language of the poem has a basic homogeneity and in fact one of the pleasures of reading Paradise Lost is to discover the wide differences the language can accommodate, without imperilling its unitive power. In this sense also the poem makes alive a basic quality of the reality which it celebrates.

Sublimity is a quality usually conceded to Paradise Lost, though it is argued that the sublimity is monolithic, that its price is petrification and that the style marches on irrespective of what is inside it. But perspicuity is not ordinarily associated with the poem, the general impression being that its syntax, its erudition and its latinised usages combine to invest it with a pervasive obscurity. Mr. Eliot is typical in observing that “the complication of a Miltonic sentence is an active complication, a complication deliberately introduced into what was a previously simplified and abstract thought.” Although this is from the 1936 essay, we also find Mr. Eliot, in his 1947 recantation, still proclaiming that Milton's style is personal rather than classic, that its elevation is not the elevation of a common style, that in Milton “there is always the maximal, never the minimal, alteration of ordinary language” and that as a poet, Milton is “probably the greatest of all eccentrics.” Similarly, Mr. Leavis observes: “So complete, and so mechanically habitual, is Milton's departure from the English order, structure and accentuation that he often produces passages that have to be read through several times before one can see how they go, though the Miltonic mind has nothing to offer that could justify obscurity—no obscurity was intended: it is merely that Milton has forgotten the English language.” …

Fortunately all generalisations about Paradise Lost (including those that offer themselves as truisms) have to encounter and survive the text. The following lines from the ninth book are quoted not only because the syntax is uniformly unorthodox, but also because the unorthodoxy is maintained at a crisis in the action, in other words, under conditions of potentially maximum irrelevance:

From his slack hand the Garland wreath'd for Eve
Down dropd, and all the faded Roses shed:
Speechless he stood and pale, till thus at length
First to himself he inward silence broke.

It should not be necessary to point out how the first inversion sets in motion the succession of linked a's that makes “slack” a reality in the sound and pace of the verse, or how the wreathing of the e sound in “wreath'd for Eve” is made more vivid by the placing of “Eve” at the climax of the line. The plummeting force of “Down dropd” is created both by the inversion and by its dramatic positioning (which the previous inversion has made possible). These departures from the normal word-order indicate how the syntax is being manoeuvred to create a pattern of impact rather than a logical or grammatical sequence. In this context “all the faded Roses shed” is surprising only in analysis. Within the poetry itself, it spreads out of the numbness of “Down dropd,” so that Adam's paralysis seems to be measured by the manner in which it passes out into nature, withering the roses with the same shock that withers him. The image succeeds precisely by not calling attention to itself, by being shaped into the situation, into the inert downward movement. The next inversion places “Speechless” at the beginning of the line; both the stressed position and its anchoring by “stood” (the alliteration is, of course, purposive) charge the word with the surrounding sense of deadness. We are made aware that Adam's speechlessness is not ordinary consternation but the mental surface of his “inward silence.” The separation of “speechless” and “pale” by “stood” (a favourite Miltonic device) is similarly functional; both in the syntax and in the reality being enacted, the inner condition is precedent and decisive. “Pale,” we must also remember, was a stronger word to Milton's contemporaries than it is to us. The suggestion here is of the pallor of death. One recalls the “shuddring horror pale” of the fallen angels and the “pale and dreadful” light of their damnation. In this context, “till thus at length” is creatively ambiguous; the grammatical coupling with “he inward silence broke” is deliberately weakened by the inversion of the fourth line and this enables the emotional link with “Speechless he stood” to become active in the total movement. “First to himself” delays and defines the climax. Adam is not soliloquising. Rather, he is seeking to achieve a response out of the momentary paralysis of his being, to create out of inward silence a ground for interior debate. The movement and tension of the poetry, charged with meaning beneath the lucid surface, shape and intensify this reality. Diction, syntax, sound and imagery contribute purposefully to the poetic result.

This analysis has been pursued in some detail to indicate that the poetry of Paradise Lost can bear and will respond to a far greater pressure of interpretation than it normally receives. It also suggests that “the complication of a Miltonic sentence” is a creative rather than an “active complication” if indeed it is a complication at all; the true aim seems to be the playing of metrical against grammatical forces to form and embolden the emotional line. This conclusion is not limited to the “simpler” kind of writing that has been analysed; the following lines present a characteristically different surface but are modelled by essentially similar forces. The quotation is from one of those passages in the third book where God the Father turns a school divine, though according to some of our better scholars, he speaks more like a seventeenth century rhetorician, an ideal student of Puttenham and Peacham.

                                                                      Man disobeying
Disloyal breaks his fealtie, and Sinns
Against the high Supremacie of Heav'n
Affecting God-head and so loosing all,
To expiate his Treason hath naught left,
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posteritie must die:
Die hee or Justice must; unless for him
Som other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
Say Heav'nly Powers, where shall we find such love,
Which of ye will be mortal to redeem
Mans mortal crime, and just th' unjust to save?
Dwels in all Heaven charitie so deare?

One is expected to note such touches as the manner in which “high supremacie” recalls I, 132, tying the human sin to the angelic. Less obvious, but equally part of the underlying network, is the exact premonition in “But to destruction sacred and devote” of the truth which breaks into Adam's inward silence (IX, 901) as he faces the finality of Eve's sin. The irony of “Affecting God-head and so loosing all” has a sardonic validity in itself but the punishment is also measured by the presumption and the legal matching of the two is part of the poem's concept of justice. Some may find the use of the images of kingship curious, but Milton's view that the only true monarchy is that of Heaven (XII, 67-71) is not only consistent but republican. In any case the imagery, with its legalistic undertone, makes possible the intensification of disobedience into disloyalty and finally into treason, thus dictating the measured and monolithic verdict: “He with his whole posteritie must die”. One notes how the quasi-rhymes bind the judgment together and how the crucial words “He” and “die” stand dramatically at the beginning and end of the line. Then comes the concentration, the sudden swoop of emphasis, as these terminal words are driven and fused together, with both the inversion, the emphatic “hee” and the brief almost ferocious power of the movement, joining to assert the law in its angry finality. Everything is to the purpose now. The semicolon after “Die hee or Justice must” reinforces the compulsive strength of “must” and once again the inversion strengthens the impact. At the same time the strong medial pause coming after an auxiliary verb creates a sense of expectation, of basic incompleteness; the movement in its clenched decisiveness dictates the relaxation into the lines that follow. The body of the verse begins to react to the awareness of a law transformed by charity. Though the language of “Som other able, and as willing” remains legalistic, the fluent movement of the verse, the suggestion of infinite love in “willing” escapes from and redefines the merely legal. In the next line, the two tendencies are forced into creative collision. “Death for death” states the law in its sterile absoluteness, an absoluteness reflected fully in the conclusive, hammer-like movement. But in “rigid satisfaction” the organic word plays against and undermines the mechanical. The legal content of “satisfaction” engages with “rigid” and with “death for death”, locking itself into the circle of crime and punishment. But the overtones of life and growth in the word point securely to a higher satisfaction, a reality beyond the exactions of the law. The line is a fortress which only love can enter but the language in erecting it has also breached it. The relaxation of the movement is now both logical and organic. One need only note the way in which the two uses of “mortal” preserve the legal equivalence while opening the way into the wider paradox of “just th' unjust to save”. In terms of the “rigid satisfaction” the balance is inequitable but the poetry has established a higher reality. It has created a world in which charity becomes an imaginative fact as well as a theological principle. This is an achievement of peculiar difficulty since sensuous imagery is forbidden by the circumstances, and the animating forces must therefore be those of syntax, and of word-play precisely and imaginatively controlled. Given these limited resources the result is a triumph of considerably more than craftsmanship.

These two widely different passages suggest both the variety of Milton's style and the criteria to which the style is answerable. That the verse will bear considerable scrutiny is evident and in fact the most difficult temptation to reject in modern criticism is that which seeks to establish complexity, irony, ambiguity and paradox as controlling qualities of Milton's writing. It is not merely convenient but reassuring to suggest that there is one right way of using poetic language and that Milton's poetry like all poetry, can be found true to that way. To deny the complexity of Paradise Lost would of course, be perverse; but that does not mean that complexity should be regarded as a principle shaping the local life of the language. The complexity of Milton's epic is less one of surface than of reverberation. It arises not so much from the immediate context, as from the connection of that context to other contexts and eventually to the context of the whole poem and of the cosmic order drawn into and recreated within it. Svendsen is right in arguing that “the basic mode of Paradise Lost is ambivalence” and paradox and irony are equally vital in its total effect. But these qualities operate through the poem's structure rather than its texture. The surface is not characteristically complex, and the resources of diction, syntax and imagery cooperate to clarify and intensify, rather than to qualify the main thrust of the poetry. Coleridge understood this when he observed that “the connection of the sentences and the position of the words are exquisitely artificial; but the position is rather according to the logic of passion or universal logic than to the logic of grammar.” A more recent critic, Professor Wright, describes Milton's style as “unusually clear and forceful” while MacCaffrey begins a perceptive discussion by stating: “elevation, not breadth is the principal dimension of epic. Unity and elevation demand that there should be a single—even, in a sense, a simple—effect produced in the reader, and this end is not to be accomplished by a style with a verbally complex surface.”

All this is clearly as it should be. If the style is to develop its primary (and symbolic) qualities of sublimity, of propulsive power, of designed and inexorable movement, it can only do so through a deliberate simplicity of surface. The other qualities which matter are not sacrificed and indeed are realized to a far greater extent than in any other poem of this magnitude. They live, however, not so much on the surface, as in the weight of qualification, connection and commentary which the whole poem places behind every point on its surface. Milton's observation that poetry is more simple, sensuous, and passionate than rhetoric is surely not meant as an attempt to confuse us about the predominant qualities of his verse. The style is capable of “metaphysical” effects or more correctly, it can frequently draw the metaphysical into the heroic; but it remains heroic and not metaphysical. The distinction is important not only in terms of decorum, but as an indication of how to read the poem, of how to respond to its impact and its tactics. The present writer is frankly not appalled by the discovery that there is more than one way of using poetic language or that Milton is Milton because he is not Donne. The open society of poetry ought to have room for the excellences of both.