The document analyzes the elements of sublimity in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost according to the definition and sources of sublimity outlined by Longinus. It examines how Milton employs lofty thoughts, stirring emotions, impressive language and imagery, and other rhetorical devices to achieve a grand poetic style and convey a sublime theme of the fall of man. Key aspects that contribute to the sublimity of the poem include its depiction of extraordinary characters like God and Satan, its vast conception that spans heaven and hell, and Milton's masterful use of blank verse. The document concludes that Paradise Lost stands out for its magnificence and sublime command of language.

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This paper deals with the study of the
elements of Sublimity in Milton’s Paradise
Lost.
A Thorough
Analysis Of
Sublimity In
Milton’s
‘Paradise Lost.’
Aleena Farooq. Roll No. 07.
B.S. English (5th
Semester.)

2. Introduction:
Longinus defined sublimity as elevation - all that which raises style above the ordinary, and
gives to it distinction in its widest and truest sense. Sublimity is "a certain distinction and
excellence in composition." Both nature and art, says Longinus, contribute to sublimity
in literature. "Art is perfect when it seems to be nature, and nature hits the mark when she
contains art hidden within her."
Sublimity, the only word that can truly characterizes Milton's poetry, according to Longinus,
is the loftiness of style. Longinus elaborated the concept of Sublimity which can be applied best
on Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Sublimity is the echo of a great soul which Milton possessed. It is the grandest feature of the
poem, Paradise Lost. The vastness of its conception casts a spell on the readers. The poem
exceeds human imagination due to its grandeur. The subject-matter of this grand poem is the
actual fate of man.
Sublimity is the most prominent feature of Milton's poetry. Sublimity means to enlarge the
imagination of the reader. Milton has leaves behind both, the ancient and modern poets, in this
respect. John Dennis quotes, "Where he has excelled all other poets, is in what he has expressed,
which is the surest, and noblest mark the most transporting effect of sublimity."
A sublime work also crosses boundaries by stirring emotions and causing a synesthetic
mixing of the senses. The audience feels with its eyes and sees with its psyche the images the
work presents. In his vivid description of light and beauty, the blind narrator in Paradise Lost
provides the audience with the same kind of vision he possesses. Neither the narrator nor the
audience is physically able to see the light, but through the medium of the written word, the
audience is able to visualize his world. The sublime transcends time and all of the limitations of
this physical world, uniting artist with audience and allowing them to experience the work with
every part of their being.
Paradise Lost has a Sublime theme, Grand characters, and Sublime Poetic Style. Milton
blends sublimity throughout Paradise Lost making it a great Sublime poetry. This great poem

3. implies greatness of Milton's soul. Milton's poetic inspiration was to write poetry through moral,
religious and patriotic motives. The sublimity of Milton's thought lies in his aim to serve his
country by putting before it noble and religious ideals in the highest poetic form.
Background:
A work is "sublime" means it is extraordinary and great. In other words it has something
that makes it inspirational and superior from other artistic creations. Longinus emphasizes the
need of highness and elevation in style to give sublimity.
The writer who achieves sublimity is a boundary crosser, whose work stands the test of time
under careful inspection, lifting the souls of its audience and filling them with, "a proud
exaltation and a sense of vaunting joy" (Longinus, 120).
John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, exemplifies the sublime, transporting its audience
through the medium of blank verse to heaven and hell and into the minds of God and Satan,
where the audience experiences the wrath of angry God and feel the despair of Lucifer, who has
been cast into outer darkness for his great disobedience.
Aspects:
This paper explores the elements of sublimity in the poem Paradise Lost. The sole purpose
of this paper is to elaborate, by a thorough study, the chief Sublime characteristics present in the
poem with the description of its themes, characters, idea, etc.
According to Longinus, in brief, the style of poetry must be elevated, moral, and noble,
having strong emotion and containing dignified figures of speech.
In his work, Milton employs what Longinus calls, "the five… fruitful sources of the grand
style" (121). The first two sources, the author's mental faculty and his ability to inspire emotions,
are innate. The third source is the use of rhetorical figures, the fourth is the effective use of
diction, and the fifth is unity through the successful arrangement of words. Longinus warns that
although emotions contribute to the sublime, emotions alone do not make a work sublime and
that a writer should be careful not to overdo it.

4. Addison, a critic, finds Milton's genius 'wonderfully turned to the Sublime', John Dennis,
another critic, calls Milton 'the sublimist of all our poets', while Jonathan Richardson concludes
that Milton's mind 'is truly poetical; Great, strong, elegant and sublime'.
Literature Review:
Milton's greatness lies in expressing even the inexpressible in the most convincing and the
most impressive terms. "Nature," as Dr. Johnson says "had bestowed upon him the power of
displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy and the
aggravating the dreadful."
The chief characteristics of the Miltonic sublime style are the avoidance of the uncommon
place both in word and phrase and a preference for the common (e.g. archaism or Latinism) in
each, full play of imagination, suggestiveness, conciseness, loftiness of tone, and free use of the
author's learning. Its total effect is that of a mighty utterance, issuing forth from the lips of a (as
Tennyson put it) "mighty- mouthed inventor of harmonies."
In Paradise Lost, Milton has brought a fine fusion of sublime thought and sublime
expression; which has modestly elevated the subject-matter of the poem. One finds lines of pure
poetry which holds one spell bound by their loveliness. Dr. Johnson remarked on Milton's
sublime theme and style. "Milton considered creation in its whole extent, and his descriptions are
therefore learned. He had accustomed his imagination to unrestrained indulgence, and his
conceptions, therefore, were extensive. The characteristic quality of his poem is sublimity. He
sometimes descends to the elegant, but his element is the great. He can occasionally invest
himself with grace; but his natural part is gigantic loftiness. He can please when pleasure is
required; but it is his peculiar power to astonish".
Methodology:
This paper analyzes the five sources of Sublimity in Paradise Lost and also explains the
Sublime theme, characters, and style of Poem. In addition to intense thoughts and passions with
which Milton wrote his masterpiece there are other sources that can be detected in the poem .The
analysis is confined to Book III due to the extended length of the poem.

5. This Book produces heaven in which God sees Satan traveling on earth .The Son sits on
His right .They discuss how fallen angels lead rebellion against God through their own free will.
They discuss also Man's future. God prophesizes that man also will disobey him and must die
unless a suitable sacrifice is offered .The Son offers to die for Man and God praises the Son, and
the angels rejoice. Satan, at the edge of the universe disguised, inquires about Man and where is
he to be found so He can tempt him. (McGoodwin, 2006:3).
Analysis:
This paper goes through the first two sources of Sublimity first and then explaining the
other three sources; Further explaining the theme, characters, and Sublime style.
 The First and Second Sources of Sublimity:
The sublimity of Milton's thoughts and emotions are reflected in a sublime form. He
accomplished his epic on Virgil's model.
In Muir's words: He decided instead to write what may be regarded as an
International epic, though he wrote it in English, and not in the Latin which he might have
chosen. He rejected the loose episodic structure of Aristotle and Spenser, and accepted
instead the Virgilian form.
 The Third, Fourth and Fifth Sources of Sublimity:
One of the images that contribute to the dignity and power of the poem is the
following one which draws the happy Garden in Heaven in which Adam and Eve are
enjoying the blessings of God in the image of reaping joy and love:
Our two first Parents, yet the only two
Of mankind, in the happie Garden plac't,
Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love,
Uninterrupted joy, unrivald love
In blissful solitude;…

6. Another image can be found in the Son's speech to God to die for the Man because
God may not leave the Son dead but he will rise again. The image presents the Son as a
victorious warrior who defeats death:
But I shall rise Victorious, and subdue
My Vanquisher, spoiled of his vanted spoile;
Death his deaths wound shall then receive, & stoop
Inglorious, of his mortall sting disarm'd.
Another figure of speech used by Milton is amplification which invests the discourse
with grandeur as is presented in the scene that describes God in a supreme way.
Sublimity comes from the Majesty of God, a grandeur that excites admiration:
Now had the Almighty Father from above,
From the pure Empyrean where he sits
High Thron'd above all highth, bent down his eye,
His own works and their works at once to to view:
About him all the Sanctities of Heaven
Stood thick as Starrs,and from his sight reciev'd
Beatitude past utterance; on his right
The radiant image of his Glory sat,
His onely Son;...
Rhetorical question is another figure used to make the language of the poem more
elevated and convincing. This is shown by the following extract of God's speech that
shows ingratitude of man towards God that Man
chose to be disobedient by his own free will: so will fall
Hee and his faithless Progenie: whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of mee
All he could have; I made him just and right,

7. Metaphor is presented with idea of the fall of man. God says that "man shall not quite
be lost, but sav'd" and this is not for will in him but from grace in God. God gives chance
for "stonie hearts" to repent and this metaphor enthralls the reader with its rhetorical,
vivid description and shows disobedience of hard hearted man:
…for I will clear their senses dark,
What may suffice, and soften stony hearts
To pray, repent, and bring obedience due.
To prayer, repentance, and obedience due,
Though but endeavour'd with sincere intent,
Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eye not shut.
And I will place within them as a guide,
My umpire Conscience; whom if they will hear,
Light after light, well us'd, they shall attain,
And to the end, persisting, safe arrive
Simile is another device used by Milton to elevate his diction in the following extract
that describes the new Globe God created and into which Satan makes a journey:
That stone, or like to that which here below
Philosophers in vain so long have sought,
Sublime Theme:
The sublimity of Paradise Lost is constituted both by its theme and poetic style. The great
epic deals with supernatural theme. It presents the fall of the rebellious angels, the creation of
man and the earth, man's disobedience of God's command and his consequent expulsion from
earthy Paradise. It is a great theme, and perhaps no other epic of the world has dealt with a theme
equally great.
Discussing the vast scope of Paradise Lost, Mr. F.E. Hutchinson says: "It ranges over all
time and space and even beyond them both. It depicts Heaven and Earth and chaos, the imagined

8. utterances of superhuman beings, events, before the emergence of man upon earth, the history of
man from the creation and by prophecy, to the end of time, and his eternal destiny... Not all the
mountain of theological speculation in the Christian centuries built upon a single chapter
of Genesis is comparable with Milton's structure, heaven-high and hell-deep."
Extra-Ordinary Characters
The characters of Milton's epic are no ordinary beings. They are God and His faithful angels,
Satan and his followers and Adam and Eve. Human mind reels to think of the great number of
angels who are actors in the vast drama of man's origin. Satan's followers form only a portion of
the population of Heaven. But even they are countless, at least so far as human reckoning is
concerned. The assembly of devil in Hell surpasses all gatherings of men in human history.
In Book-I of Paradise Lost, we only come across Satan and the fallen angels. Milton has
thrown around Satan a singularity of daring, grandeur of sufferance and a ruined splendor which
constitute the very height of poetic sublimity. The fallen angels are thus and otherwise made
lofty and indefinable in person and power, thought and feeling, movement and demeanor. "Their
deliberations are a ceremonial, their diversions a spectacle or adventure, their solace the pleasing
sorcery of philosophy or a sublime concord of harp and voice" (Elmer Edgar Stoll).
Sublime Poetic Style:
The next factor which contributes to the sublimity of Milton's epic is the grandeur of his
verse. In Paradise Lost Milton's blank verse reaches its perfection. He makes his first serious
attempt with blank verse in Comus. In it he shows a tendency to fall back on the single-molded
line of Marlowe, accurately constructed in itself and correctly accumulated but not jointed, and
continued and twined into a contrasted pattern of various but homogeneous design.
"Yet even here the power of his genius for verse and his matchless daring in experiment
introduced variety. And when, some twenty years after, he perhaps began and some thirty years
after definitely set to work on and completed Paradise Lost, he had become an absolute master
of the blank verse line, single and combined."

9. Conclusion:
Milton's blank verse in Paradise Lost is in full accord with the grandeur of his epic's theme.
Both the form and the subject-matter of the poem combine to make it a great epic. Dryden
ascribed loftiness of mind to Homer, and "mygesty" to Virgil, and a combination of the two to
Milton.
When Paradise Lost was published, the Earl of Dorset sent copy of it to Dryden, who in a
short time returned it with the comment: "This man cuts us all out and the Ancients too. In
sublimity of thought and majesty of expression both sustained at almost superhuman pitch,
Milton has no superior, and no rival except Dante."
His subject may attract to repel: his temper may be repellent and can hardly be very
attractive though it may have its admirers. But the magnificence of his poetical command of the
language in which he writes has only to be perceived in order to carry all before it.
The epic poem "Paradise Lost" is known for its sublime style. Milton draws sublimity
from different sources. Investigating the five sources Longinus set for sublimity in the third book
of this poem shows that all these sources are used by Milton to endow his style with grandeur.
This grandeur is detected on the levels of form and content in this masterpiece.
References:
1. http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com/2010/11/elements-of-sublimity-in-paradise-
lost.html
2. http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-according-to-longinus-are-
sources.html
3. Beautiful Sublime The Making of ‘Paradise Lost,’ 1701-1734
LESLIE E. MOORE
4. http://english638.blogspot.com/2010/02/milton-and-sublime.html
5. http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/paradise-lost/critical-essays/miltons-grand-
style
6. http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/give-example-any-poem-that-can-
considered-sublime-456959