SOURCE: “Milton's Passionate Epic,” in Milton Studies, Vol. 1, 1969, pp. 167-92.

In the following essay, Fixler shows that Milton conceived Paradise Lost as a form of devotional celebration, a revelation and praise of God and his mysteries.

I grateful to the anonymous reviewer who recently in the Times Literary Supplement called for a study of Paradise Lost that would show it to be not only a logical epic and a deliberate epic, but a passionate epic as well. May I here offer a partial installment of an essay in this direction, covenanting with my audience for its later more complete fulfilment, though probably in a context where Milton's passion would be seen as an aspect of his whole sense of what poetry was for, how it worked, and how its energies originated. The immediate occasion for the reviewer's wish was a notice of Ernest Sirluck's excellent lecture in which...