Alan Jacobs

I have mixed feelings about podcasting, about doing what I’m doing right now, talking into a microphone and preparing to post it online.

When I listen to podcasts, nothing annoys me more than yammering, than people who just turn on the hit the record button and just go for it and say whatever comes to their minds.

It seems disrespectful to the audience to me.

On the other hand, when in the past, trying to avoid yammering, I have written out a podcast text, read it, recorded it, posted it.

It seems relatively lifeless to me.

And also, since I’m such a longtime blogger, if I’m going to write it out, why not just post it as a blog post?

So what I’m trying to do here is to get over this double dislike of podcasting, or at least of podcasting as I do it or as I imagine myself doing it.

I’m going to try to talk casually and informally without a script.

And yet, I hope to avoid yammering.

Now, why do I think I can do that?

Well, because that’s what I do when I teach.

I’ve been teaching for over 40 years now, and I come into class with notes, but I rarely refer to them.

I talk extemporaneously.

I look at books and portions of books.

I look at paragraphs.

I read things aloud.

I talk about them.

I ask people questions about them.

And I don’t think it’s especially yammering.

So I’m going to trust that at some point in this series of podcast episodes that I plan to record, I will figure out how to do it.

I will become more comfortable with it.

I will no longer be cringing.

Actually, I would certainly cringe if I were to listen to this.

But once I recorded, I’m not listening to it.

I’m going to post it, but I’m not going to listen to it first.

I’m just going to put it out there and see what happens.

Anyway, why am I here?

I’m here because I have written a biography of Paradise Lost, the epic poem by John Milton.

And what do I mean by a biography?

Well, this is in a series that Princeton University Press does called Lives of Great Religious Books.

Fred Appel, the wonderful religion editor at PUP, created this series, and I’ve already written a volume for it some years ago on the Book of Common Prayer.

And the idea is to understand that when a book is published, it’s born, and then it has a long life ahead of it, or at least some books do.

And what happens in that long life?

What are the adventures that the book goes through?

And I’m doing this about now, about Paradise Lost, because Paradise Lost has had an absolutely fascinating reception history.

It is something that I knew about long before I wrote the book, but learned a great deal more about in writing the book, and it’s absolutely fascinating.

But it’s really only fascinating to people who actually know Paradise Lost.

So these few episodes that I’m going to be doing here over the next couple of weeks are going to be a kind of introduction to the poem, or possibly a reminder for people who have read the poem but have forgotten it.

So let me tell you a little bit about the structure of my biography.

The first thing that I do is to write about the poet.

Now, that’s not an obvious thing to do when you’re writing a biography of a book.

Biography of a book is not the biography of its author.

But in the case of Paradise Lost, there are so many people who read the book in light of what they know or what they think they know about the author.

Milton was a very curious character, a very controversial character, and it’s impossible for people who know anything about Milton when reading Paradise Lost not to have some kind of, not to have their response in some way colored by their attitudes toward the poet.

And of course, this is, I think this may be true in any case, but with any book, you read the book in light of the author and you read the author in light of the book, but it’s this tension between text and author is intensified in the case of Milton because he’s writing a poem about the angel who rebelled against the God who made him and who sought to ruin the new creation of that God, the first human couple, Adam and Eve, who is the enemy of humanity, who is evil incarnate, and yet we also know that Milton was someone who rebelled against the lawful king of England and who collaborated in, encouraged, and then afterwards defended the execution of this king.

So how is that supposed to work?

How are we supposed to understand the regicide who is writing a poem about another would-be regicide, but one whom he despises and condemns?

How’s that supposed to work?

In some sense, it’s a very simple thing.

Milton believed that King Charles I, though rightfully placed on the throne, lawfully placed on the throne, had effectively unkinged himself through his tyrannical behavior, which was irresponsible and illegal, and he had been persistent in it and had thus forfeited the loyalty of his subjects.

So he became a tyrant, and as a tyrant, he was worthy of being deposed.

Indeed, it was a duty to depose him.

That’s Milton’s view.

God, on the other hand, is not a tyrant.

God is the lawful and rightful king of the universe that he made.

Everything that we are comes from him.

We owe our very being to him.

There is no allegiance that he could demand that we would not be obliged to give him.

So for Milton, it’s simple.

But those dissonances are, I think, part of the experience of reading the poem.

So I had to say something at the beginning about Milton himself, and he’s a fascinating figure in all sorts of ways.

You see him beginning his career as a spectacularly gifted student at Cambridge University.

He is someone who seeks to be part of the kind of late flowering of Renaissance humanism, and not by the way only in the arts but also in the sciences.

Milton actually went to Italy and met Galileo.

But he gradually sets aside his artistic ambitions because of what he believed to be the urgency of the political situation in England where this tyrant was on the throne.

And only after Charles was overthrown and executed and his government was replaced by what was called the Protectorate under the authority of Oliver Cromwell, for whom Milton worked, he was a diplomat essentially who exchanged letters, almost always in Latin, with other governments in Europe.

And during this period, he began to think that he could perhaps return to his poetic ambitions.

He knew he wanted to write something big.

He knew he wanted to write something of epic scope, but he wasn’t sure what that was going to be.

For a long time, he was thinking about writing an epic based on the story of King Arthur because he thought an English epic might be the right thing to do.

After all, Virgil had written a Roman epic and one that was deeply implicated in the history and the character of his native land.

You could say that Homer had done the same thing on a somewhat smaller scale in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

So isn’t that what epic poems are?

And therefore, isn’t that what Milton himself should do if he wants to be an epic poet?

But gradually, he began to think that that was too small for him and that there was something larger that as great as his interest in the arts, but also in the sciences.

Milton actually went to Italy and met Galileo.

But he gradually sets aside his artistic ambitions because of what he believed to be the urgency of the political situation in England where this tyrant was on the throne.

And only after Charles was overthrown and executed and his government was replaced by what was called the Protectorate under the authority of Oliver Cromwell, for whom Milton worked, he was a diplomat essentially who exchanged letters, almost always in Latin, with other governments in Europe.

And during this period, he began to think that he could perhaps return to his poetic ambitions.

He knew he wanted to write something big.

He knew he wanted to write something of epic scope, but he wasn’t sure what that was going to be.

For a long time, he was thinking about writing an epic based on the story of King Arthur because he thought an English epic might be the right thing to do.

After all, Virgil had written a Roman epic and one that was deeply implicated in the history and the character of his native land.

You could say that Homer had done the same thing on a somewhat smaller scale in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

So isn’t that what epic poems are?

And therefore, isn’t that what Milton himself should do if he wants to be an epic poet?

But gradually, he began to think that that was too small for him and that there was something larger that as great as his interest in the arts, but also in the sciences.

Milton actually went to Italy and met Galileo.

But he gradually sets aside his artistic ambitions because of what he believed to be the urgency of the political situation in England where this tyrant was on the throne.

And only after Charles was overthrown and executed and his government was replaced by what was called the Protectorate under the authority of Oliver Cromwell, for whom Milton worked, he was a diplomat essentially who exchanged letters, almost always in Latin, with other governments in Europe.

And during this period, he began to think that he could perhaps return to his poetic ambitions.

He knew he wanted to write something big.

He knew he wanted to write something of epic scope, but he wasn’t sure what that was going to be.

For a long time, he was thinking about writing an epic based on the story of King Arthur because he thought an English epic might be the right thing to do.

After all, Virgil had written a Roman epic and one that was deeply implicated in the history and the character of his native land.

You could say that Homer had done the