Paradise Lost is intimately connected with the changing attitudes and forms of feeling which run
through the history of epic.
Plunging like Homer, Milton invokes, then narrates, then hands over to speeches before going on into a series of full length similes. All of these bear the hallmark of the ancient epics. It is evident that Milton is assailing the reader with the recognized distinctive elements of ancient epic.
In this respect, Paradise Lost consummates the revisionary attitude to past literature which is displayed in Renaissance epic from its earliest stages. It progressively approximates towards the writing of the past and its forms of heroism. It is driven by twin urges both to communicate with, and to depart from, the writings of the past. The poem intimates that one can try to imagine towards past epic, and that one can at least seek a transcendent release from the limitations of past forms of heroism.
Paradise Lost does not simply overwrite the past. It creates a utopian pressure towards an ideal future, in which an ideally creative poet would revolutionize the form of epic. But, it remains aware of its necessary debts to the language and narrative forms which it has inherited and which hold it back from fully achieving that perfection transformation of the genre.
Most of the allusions in Paradise Lost are biblical in accordance with the chosen subject. For example - Jesus, Moses, three sacred mountains etc.
Milton makes man’s fall a more heroic subject than Achilles’ wrath in the Iliad or Odysseus’ misfortune in The Odyssey and Aeneas’ tribals in the Aeneid. Milton defines the concept of Christian heroism positing it as far superior to pagan heroism that valorizes physical courage. Milton invests in Satanic traits of earlier epic heroes – wrath, envy, resourcefulness (to defraud), enterprise and the will to undertake dangerous journeys.
Milton in Book 1 of Paradise Lost seemed eager to establish epic credentials.
However, Book 9 opens with an Epic invocation which surveys the epic tradition itself. It hinges on extended similes, and on extended or crowded allusions to the culture of antiquity.
Milton created a new and bewilderingly vast space for the epic. He moved the genre away from the wars of antagonistic passions which had preoccupied his immediate predecessors, towards a concern with obligations to and differences from, past writing.
However, Paradise Lost is not the only work to significantly affect the epic form in the eighteenth century. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, though perhaps not itself an epic did provide a critique of the heroic modes of romance and hence epic, and thus enabled innovations in the genre. Henry Fielding’s novels, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones labeled by their authors “comic-epic-poems in prose,” are notable challenges to the epic tradition, suggesting a new heroism based not on outstanding leadership and chivalry but on everyday sincerity.