"Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare?" asks Nigel Smith in the title of his new book (Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $22.95). The obvious answer is no: It would be hard to dispute that Shakespeare's plays are more powerful, and more central to our culture, than Milton's biblical epics or his artfully classical lyrics. Around the world, when people dream about true love, they think of Romeo and Juliet; when they thrill with ambition, they think of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and so on down the list of Shakespeare's characters. Harold Bloom could even speculate, not quite in jest, that Shakespeare invented human nature, so completely does he seem to dominate our imagination of what it means to be human.

Click Image to Enlarge Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University An advertisement for the first printing of 'Paradise Lost.'

Ever since "Paradise Lost" was published in 1667, Milton has been acclaimed as a supreme English poet, Shakespeare's only rival in linguistic mastery. Yet even at the height of his prestige, in the 18th century, Milton never inspired the kind of ardent intimacy that readers bring to Shakesepare. Nor is it simply our lazy generation, unused to reading long poems and deaf to the majesty of Milton's artifice, that has relegated "Paradise Lost" to the seminar room. Even Samuel Johnson, in his "Life of Milton," wrote that "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions."

When Mr. Smith writes that "No student of Milton has left Paradise Lost without feeling ... an ardor of admiration," the very structure of the sentence sounds haunted by Johnson's famous verdict. In fact, "Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare?" is damaged, in several ways, by Mr. Smith's awkward attempts to sell the reader on Milton. The very title is a bait and switch, for despite what it seems to promise, Mr. Smith is not at all interested in comparing Milton with Shakespeare. After a defiantly unconvincing proclamation, early in the book, that "the reach of Milton's achievements is far greater than Shakespeare's," Mr. Smith abandons this doubtful battleground, never to return to it.

Nor does Mr. Smith seem at ease when, in his introduction, he pelts the reader with a series of overingenious claims for Milton's relevance. We should be reading the poet, Mr. Smith says, because the Puritans were like Al Qaeda; or because the Founding Fathers read him; or because he is "a literary embodiment of so many of the aspirations that have guided Americans"; or because the popular children's books of Philip Pullman draw heavily on "Paradise Lost," or, bizarrely, because Miltonic themes "run through" the lyrics of "the Grammy-winning metal band Slayer." By the time Mr. Smith describes "Comus" as "a kind of rap poetry" (on the basis of lines like "Meanwhile welcome joy and feast/Midnight shout, and revelry"), it is clear that he is protesting too much.

Once you get past the misleading title and the hyperbolic introduction, what Mr. Smith has written is nothing more or less than an introduction to some of the major issues in current Milton criticism and scholarship. Mr. Smith is a professor of English at Princeton, and it is easy to imagine this book as the distillation of his Milton course. "Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare?" offers a graduate seminar, however, not a freshman survey. Mr. Smith does not move through Milton's works chronologically, or summarize their forms and contents, or sketch in the historical background. He assumes a reader already familiar with Arminianism and the Long Parliament.

Instead, Mr. Smith organizes his book around a few broad themes  divorce, free will, tyranny  which he then traces through Milton's poetry and prose. Within its limits, this is a useful and illuminating method, allowing Mr. Smith to draw on his encyclopedic knowledge of Milton's works to make unexpected connections. Mr. Smith is especially interested in connecting Milton the prose writer  the Puritan controversialist who defended the execution of Charles I, the radical defender of divorce rights and free speech  with Milton the erudite and allusive poet. Thus he shows how the happy eroticism of Milton's Eden  "nor turned I ween / Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites/Mysterious of connubial love refused"  contrasts with his vision of unhappy marriage in his pamphlet on divorce: "to grind in the mill of an undelighted and servile copulation, must be the only forced work of a Christian marriage."

Mr. Smith's speculations are sometimes unconvincing, and he is perhaps too ready to lend an ear to the latest theories mooted in the professional journals. (When the newly created Eve gazes at herself in the water, is Milton really offering "an amazing account of same-sex desire ... the story of the lesbian's denial at the very birth of her self-consciousness"?) But Mr. Smith does succeed in giving the reader a sense of the richness and surprise of Milton's writing, and of the tensions that keep his work vital  between the poet and the prose writer, the Christian and the republican, the Bible reader and the scientific speculator.

When all is said, however, these are not the main reasons why Milton continues to appeal to readers in the 21st century. What makes any poet live is not the scholarly ingenuity devoted to him, but the aesthetic pleasure and philosophical challenge he offers. It is on these grounds, not the grounds of "relevance," that Milton should be defended  or, rather, cherished, for he needs no defending. Mr. Smith gives many examples of the sheer musical beauty of Milton's verse, which is like no other in English. This is a very artificial music, the periods wrought with great deliberation, the lines and sentences setting up an extended counterpoint. Yet no one who takes pleasure in the sound of language could possibly read Milton without being thrilled, again and again, by cadences like this one from "Lycidas":

Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,

Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide

Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;

Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,

Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,

Where the great vision of the guarded mount

Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold.

Beyond his music, Milton offers the enduring provocation of his deeply paradoxical understanding of good and evil. In all his work, Milton only created one Shakespearean character, one character who seems to escape the words on the page and take up residence in our unconscious: Satan, the hero-villain of "Paradise Lost." But because Satan is more than a literary character  because he was, for Milton, a really existing being, and remains, for us, a mythic symbol of enormous power  he has an existential weight even greater than Hamlet's.

Satan, in Milton's epic, is necessarily a figure of horror  the father of Sin and Death, the prince of Pandemonium, the tempter of Eve. Yet he is also, as readers have noticed for hundreds of years, a much more compelling character than God the Father or God the Son, who cannot escape the abstractness of their omnipotence. Satan's pride, which leads him to revolt against God rather than accept the elevation of Jesus to God's second-in-command, makes him a kind of cosmic Iago or Edmund. "[I]n my choice," he declares, "To reign is worth ambition, though in hell: / Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."

This is, quite obviously, not an attitude that Milton wants the reader to share; it is his infinite pride that makes Satan the Evil One. Yet because this striving, fallible figure necessarily drives the action of the poem, it is impossible not to identify with Satan as one reads. As William Blake put it, "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it." This paradox, which arises out of Milton's contradictory conception of a Christian epic, seems to point to a profound and unsettling truth about human nature. If evil is exciting and goodness dull, if we love our fallen-ness because we cannot imagine a life without action, then what chance do we have for redemption? "Paradise Lost," a poem written in order to "justify the ways of God to men," serves instead as a mirror held up to human nature to expose its essential sinfulness. As Mr. Smith writes, "this astonishing literature does not seem to lend itself to coherence"  which is why, in an age even less coherent than Milton's own, he is still able to speak to us with the intimacy of greatness.

[email protected]