John Quincy Adams on the Opening Lines of Milton's Paradise Lost

Abstract

TF THE ADAMSES HAD A CULTURE HERO, it was surely John Milton. t True, New England as a whole might have a claim: as Charles Francis Adams, Jr., said, Milton was essentially laureate poet of Puritans and . . . Massachusetts conceived in Puritanism was, par excellence, Puritan Commonwealth.' But Adamses when they did take men or ideas into their bosom, selected them for enduring intimacy. The first of distinguished line wrote in his diary at age of twenty: Reading Milton. That man's soul, it seems to me, was distended as wide as creation. His power over human mind was great beyond conception, and his learning without bounds. can only gaze at him with astonishment, without comprehending vast compass of his capacity.2 This awe was to be echoed in John Adams's son, who wrote that he at age of ten had tried to read Paradise Lost: I attempted ten times to read, and never could get through half a book .... was mortified even to shedding of solitary tears, that could not even conceive what it was that my father and mother admired so much in book, and yet was ashamed to ask them an explanation.... was nearly thirty when first read Paradise Lost with delight and astonishment.3 After this hesitant approach, there is evidence in John Quincy Adams's copy book of his close grappling with poem. Disagreeing with Addison's celebration of plainness and simplicity of first lines of Paradise Lost, he comments that the sentence consisting of sixteen lines is too long to deserve praise of simplicity.