ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ongoing readings made against the grain of Paradise Lost, as well as those made with it, in some of the most significant of Milton's modern critics. In 1930 E. M. W. Tillyard explored the problematic relationship between Paradise Lost as a complete text and its reception history. C. S. Lewis saw the root cause more clearly than most and so in A Preface to Paradise Lost he set about establishing the form of Paradise Lost before trying to gauge its success as a literary work. The chapter suggests that Milton's poem expresses the failure of human will in the Fall of man and that only the poem considered in its entirety will make this fully intelligible to the reader. Harold Bloom argues that Lucy Newlyn is the paradigm, and most intelligent observer, of Romantic reading against the grain in the twentieth century.
