Now you may urge that Milton and Shelley dropped Job for hero because both felt him to be a merely static figure: and that the one chose Satan, the rebel angel, the other chose Prometheus the rebel Titan, because both are active rebels, and as epic and drama require action, each of these heroes makes the thing move; that Satan and Prometheus are not passive sufferers like Job but souls as quick and fiery as Byron's Lucifer:
Souls who dare use their immortality-- Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in His everlasting face, and tell him that His evil is not good.
Very well, urge this: urge it with all your might. All the while you will be doing just what I desire you to do, using "Job" alongside "Prometheus Unbound" and "Paradise Lost" as a comparative work of literature.
But, if you ask me for my own opinion why Milton and Shelley dropped their intention to make poems on the "Book of Job," it is that they no sooner tackled it than they found it to be a magnificent poem already, and a poem on which, with all their genius, they found themselves unable to improve.
I want you to realise a thing most simple, demonstrable by five minutes of practice, yet so confused by conventional notions of what poetry is that I dare say it to be equally demonstrable that Milton and Shelley discovered it only by experiment. Does this appear to you a bold thing to say of so tremendous an artist as Milton? Well, of course it would be cruel to quote in proof his paraphrases of Psalms cxiv and cxxxvi: to set against the Authorised Version's
When Israel went out of Egypt, The house of Jacob from a people of strange language
When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son After long toil their liberty had won--
O give thanks.... To him that stretched out the earth above the waters: for his mercy endureth for ever. To him that made great lights: for his mercy endureth for ever
Who did the solid earth ordain To rise above the watery plain; _For his mercies aye endure,_ _Ever faithful, ever sure._ Who, by his all-commanding might, Did fill the new-made world with light; _For his mercies aye endure,_ _Ever faithful, ever sure._
verses yet further weakened by the late Sir William Baker for "Hymns Ancient and Modern."