SOURCE: “The Language of Paradise Lost,” in Milton: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Louis L. Martz, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968, pp. 56-60.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1964 as a introduction to his edition of the first two books of Paradise Lost, Rajan surveys other critics' responses to the style of the epic and claims that the work's diction, sound, and imagery contribute to the poetic result of a lucid surface whose depths are charged with meaning.

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...