SOURCE: “Paradise Lost: The Uncertain Epic,” in Milton Studies, Vol. XVII, 1983, pp. 105-19.

In the following essay, Rajan argues that Paradise Lost is a mixed-genre poem whose primary genre of epic undergoes revisionary treatment in Milton's hands and holds that the work seeks its identity between possibilities of epic and tragedy, or loss and restoration.

The problem of the genre of Paradise Lost seems to have been a problem from the day the poem was published. Dryden may have said that “this man … cuts us all out and the ancients too,”¹ but it did not take long for the caution of the critic to make its inroads on the generosity of the poet. In the preface to Sylvae (1685) the objections are stylistic—to the “flats” among Milton's elevations, to his “antiquated words,” and to the “perpetual harshness” of their sound. But eight years later, in the Discourse Concerning...