"In one sense, therefore, it is perfectly true that Milton represents the end of a tradition rather than the "main stream" of future English poetry. New forms of thought arose to make new demands on poetic resources, which had to be answered in new ways. Milton's technical lesson for us now is not in the particular poetic devices of Paradise Lost, but in his example as a conscientious artist: we are to think of him as the grand creator and preserver of decorum — a supreme poetic virtue, called today by other names — on a scale scarcely matched in English, once we have spoken of Shakespeare. " pp 4

C.f. "plowing" from Kerrigan

"It is, finally, unimportant whether or not we "like" a particular terminology, or accept as "true" a scaffolding of ideas which by its nature must have a limited validity. The test is pragmatic: does it work, does it further analysis and elucidation? What matters is poems (novels, plays) and their accessibility. Their voices do not cease; it is for us to tune our ears as best we can. " pp 8

C.f. Lieb's dialectics

"Joseph Campbell connects this scheme with "the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation — initiation — return: which might be called the nuclear unit of the monomyth." 1 Return is a vital thread in the pattern. The mythic journey of life is circular; it leads around the world, or back to the starting-point, until we catch sight of the immortal sea that brought us hither. " pp 23

Perhaps use for the latin epigram

"Ralegh, recounting the beginning of human time in his History, quoted Bede:

For eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge was Adam driven out of Paradise, in exilium vitae temporalis, "into the banishment of temporal life," saith Beda.4

The exile of our life, occasioned by the Fall" pp 24

Dialectics have been central to his Christian poetic themes from the very start

"In his great central work, Milton embodied definitively and comprehensively the Christian pattern of human destiny. But his total poetic oeuvre can also be seen as a set of variations on a single theme, the fruit of the forbidden tree. From the Nativity, in which was recorded the death of Pan and the advent of the one true God, to Samson Agonistes where fallen man rises phoenix-like from the ashes of his dark fate, Milton traced and retraced the paradigm of loss and return, fall and resurrection." pp 26

"The Fall of Man is, therefore, to be understood not only as a lapse into sin, but as a retreat from truth; the search for "heavenly Truth" and for lost Paradise thus become subjective and objective aspects of a single pilgrimage. The cause of our perplexities is exposed by Milton in a celebrated paragraph of his prose, where knowledge is represented as the power of penetrating chaos to restore order. "

"The daily warfare of the wayfaring Christian is, therefore, not only a contest between good and evil, but an effort to see them clearly. The goal of the life journey can be called regained paradise; just as accurately, it can be seen as the state of man in paradise: possessing the capacity to perceive truth, not by following the roundabout paths we now take, but directly. This is achieved by our regeneration in Christ; then, Milton wrote, "is the understanding restored in great part to its primitive clearness. [from DDC]" 14 " pp 34

What is meant by myth

"The illusion of Milton's epic is "virtual myth": in it, we come as close as we ever can to the experience of living in the lost garden. Paradise Lost does not represent Milton's, or anyone else's, ordinary manner of thinking about the truths of Christianity; for that, we may look inter alia to the Christian Doctrine. What the poem does is to allow us, temporarily, to share a manner of seeing that will capture accurately the outlines of a peculiar kind of reality; and to make it do this Milton, guided by the natural movement of the myth itself, invented a series of techniques profoundly original, and strange with the strangeness of the long-forgotten — among them a style reverberatory and unmetaphorical, and a "spatial" structural pattern of interlocking, mutually dependent parts. " pp 42-43

What is meant by myth

"The poet whose subject is myth strives to promote, therefore, not learning but knowledge; to evoke not surprise but acknowledgment; to produce not development but revelation, not an introduction to something new, but a deepened understanding of something old. Consequently, the "normal" straightforward narrative patterns traditional to story-tellers will be inappropriate; suspense will be replaced by the tacit comment of interconnecting temporal threads. The mythical narrative slights chronology in favor of a folded structure which continually returns upon itself, or a spiral that circles about a single center; in this, it reproduces the very shape of the myth itself, which is circularly designed for resonance and cross-reference. The poem will be built from a blueprint rather than a map; because suspense is neglected and expanding implications are stressed, it will have the third dimension of depth, whereas the ordinary story is built in the two surface dimensions and the fourth, time. " pp 44-5

See Arthur Baker (referenced) directly

"It has been suggested, too, that Milton's initial statement of his subjects — disobedience, woe, restoration — corresponds to the pattern of Virgil's — the fall of Troy, the journey, the founding of Rome.12 " pp 49

We are suspended in time, but thrust through Milton's universe: hoisted up and thrust down

"Paradise Lost is a poem of forces, of constant pressure on mind, feeling, and will. The poetry makes us experience these pressures by manifesting their upward thrust or downward drag, the direction of their movement within Milton's universe. "High thoughts," "high words," "high matter" propel the actors upward; recurrent falls attest to the power of "lower" impulses. The spiritual forces at work in the action, though they may be invisible to mortal sight, can be given a degree of unseen but physical reality, by being located in the poem's imaginative structure. " pp 67-8

Hell is everywhere with Satan. Everywehre I go, there I am

"Satan's arguments about place have, therefore, a kind of truth — though it is a truth that recoils on the speaker and proves itself in a direction opposite from the one intended. As Milton observes,

within him Hell

He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell One step no more then from himself can fly By change of place, (iv.20-23)

This is the dreadful truth that Satan himself admits a few lines later. His isolation has been successful. He is, indeed, no more to be changed by place; he is immune to the enormous bliss of Eden, untouched by the sun's rays that impart light to all. Instead, he has become capable himself of changing the place in which he is: the shadow of Hell falls on the paradisal brightness where he moves. The desolating futility of his cry to God can only be understood in the context of his former claims:

Ο then at last relent: is there no place Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left? (iv.79-80)

But he has already boasted himself unchanged by place; " pp 72

MEtas crit of Bentley

Thither came Uriel, gliding through the Eeven On a Sun beam, swift as a shooting Starr In Autumn thwarts the night, when vapors fir'd Impress the Air, and shews the Mariner From what point of his Compass to beware Impetuous winds, (iv.555-60)

This was one of the passages that enraged Bentley, whose remark on it is nevertheless pertinent.

I never heard but here, that the Evening was a Place or Space to glide through. Evening implies Time, and he might with equal propriety say, Came gliding through Six a clock.21

Whether or not it was always conscious, Milton experienced the world of his epic architecturally, in terms of mass and mass" pp 76-77

Funny quotation from the second defense

"He wrote that "the epic poet, who adheres at all to the rule of that species of composi tion, does not profess to describe the whole life of the herowhom he celebrates, but only some particular action of his life." 3 Elevation, not breadth, is the principal dimension of epic. " pp 93-4

TSE a savage for that

"T. S. Eliot's notorious opinion that "Milton may be said never to have seen anything" 8 is intelligible only in the light of this background, whereby visual detail illicitly became the standard of valid imagery. "

This is a must-cite from The Reason of Church Government. The tensions are so intentional

"as Milton had written, "If we look but on the nature of elemental and mixed things, we know they cannot suffer any change of one kind or quality into another, without the struggle of contrarieties." 15 His vocabulary embodies this struggle on the fundamental plane of connotative language. Unlike Homer, whose epithets are almost invariably attached to one object or personage, Milton uses for each major "idea" made incarnate in the poem a fluid stock of modifiers, all tending in a similar direction, within which he can choose freely. The result is repetition, not of identical epithets, but of groups of words whose connotations support each other, and contrast with other groups that modify opposing concepts. Milton makes his words take sides; the objects of the poem, both animate and inanimate, along with their names, are aligned in opposing ranks and forced to participate in the War in Heaven that is being continued on earth. " pp 101

building on the statistical analysis of Ms. Miles, TSE's complain about vocab and imagery can be summarily dispelled

"The phalanxes of terms marshalled by Milton on each side of his battle-line distill the essential qualities of the contestants. On one hand: dark, foul, horrid, fiery, sad, gloomy, forlorn, wild, dreadful, cold, burnt, dire, deep, grim, hopeless; on the other: glorious, bright, happy, high, fair, warm, vital, golden, sweet, melodious, clear. In Paradise, a third list can be gathered: soft, gentle, fresh, pure, tender, cool, kindly, delicious, mild, profuse. T o set together in this way the modifiers of Milton's basic "places" is to see more clearly how his method may be called centripetal. , " pp 102-03

Generative capabilities of chaos. Wasteful is a reflection of talents, still! Chaos is a symbol of poetic birth

"Immeasurable, though a literal description of Chaos, also has emotive overtones: extravagance, being beyond or outside all rule or measure, in defiance of order. These connotations are reinforced by the anger of outrageous and the uncontrollability of wild. It is interesting to compare with this passage the lines spoken by God of himself on the preceding page, where he is saying some of the same things that Milton says about Chaos, but with a different implication.

Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill Infinitude, (vii. 168-69)

Boundless is rather different in its reverberations from immeasurable; it hints at freedom from limit and restraint rather than rebellion against reasonable measure. Bound is the word used by Raphael in his account of the scale of being in Book V: "bounds Proportiond to each kind" (478-79); and in a preceding line, the Son is to bid the Deep "within appointed bounds be Heav'n and Earth" (vii. 167). Boundless is therefore appropriate for the Being at the head of the scale, the unlimited Creator of limited creatures.19 " pp 104

"sacred metaphor" vs Fallen dialectics. Every instance of iamgery renders a reminder of our fallen state

concupisciential inheritance

"The typical unit of the Miltonic style cannot be the dramatic image, standing for something else — explicit in allegory, implicit in "oblique" poetry — nor the statement drawing symbolic implication from a concrete presentation, as Wordsworth's verse often does. All these styles, to put the point spectacularly, are styles for a fallen world. All of them are varietiesof metaphor, describing an object by comparing it with something else, joining two universes of discourse. Metaphor is a device of rhetoric and dialectic, important ways of explaining and knowing for us, who are obliged to analyze before we can understand. But dialectic itself was one of the unhappy results of the Fall; it is the fallen angels who debate. When the object is completely seen at once, metaphor is unnecessary; it is saturated with the "meaning" that we usually apply to it from outside." pp 108

His meaning diffuse throughout

"It is not a philosophical poem in the manner of the Essay on Man or The Prelude, or even Paradise Regained. Although it contains plenty of arguments, it is not itself an argument, but a presentation, and the images represented are not illustrations but causes of moral events. Moral efficacy must therefore be manifest in them and shown to be part of the poem's meaning; but this cannot be done by discoursing on moral problems. Johnson observed, with some regret, that "splendid passages containing lessons of morality or precepts of prudence occur seldom." 20 There is no place in Paradise Lost for the grave classical splendors of Ben Jonson's great odes, "the Stand" upon moral precept: "It is not growing like a tree ... " Still less can Milton allow himself the admonitory gestures to the reader with which Sylvester's DuBartas bristles: "Thou scoffing Atheist . . ." "Know (bold Blasphemer) . . .", "Yet think not . . ." The dramatic, undidactic quality of Milton's epic emerges clearly against the background of the Divine Weekes, where divergent intent and execution transform a "similar" subject from myth into a quaint scientific and historical chronicle. For Milton, the myth and its meaning were not to be distinguished; so we find him, most of the time, describing something actually going on or existing — characters acting and speaking, Paradise or Hell in their substantial reality. " pp 110

Descriptors of chaos, abyss, generative potential but still negative

"By degrees, we are introduced to a many-sided but "single" entity, each epithet adding some essential attribute. Take Abyss, one of the names for Chaos, a key figure in the drama. It is called, first, vast; then "the dark unbottom'd infinite Abyss" (ii.405); later, hollow, wild, nethermost, dark, desolate, immeasurable, vexed, untractable, and "wide interrupt" (iii.83). From these terms, we can put together a gloss that will summarize what Milton wished us to know about the archetypal abyss. It is the negative counterpart, or perhaps the negative aspect, of God — an infinity living in the "nethermost" regions farthest removed from Heaven; in its deepest depth is Hell. It is Heaven's opposite, in being a waste land (desolate), subject to the passions of vexation, misrule, and rebellion (untractable); no light comes there. Its negativeness is defined by hollow, unbottom'd, and by interrupt, suggesting a vacancy in creation. But vast and infinite are still relevant, because the Abyss is potential divinity, the teeming source of worlds on which the Spirit of God has brooded. All this comes merely from the epithets used for abyss itself; our understanding is further expanded when we trace the image through its other names: pit, gulf, deep. " pp 116-17

Good info about Miltonic simile and his appropriation thereof

"Homer's similes provide relief from the steady surge of heroic action, and widen the scope of his poems. Into the simile could be introduced familiar scenes to remind the listener of the world living on beyond the plains of Troy or Odysseus' storm-beaten vessel. On the whole, this precedent was followed, or at least honored, by epic poets up to Milton. In Paradise Lost, tradition is modified to weave the long similes more closely into the poem's structure and meaning. Milton's purpose was to absorb mythological themes into their myths, reassembling Truth as, in his figure, Isis reassembled the body of Osiris. His similes descend from the universale of myth to instances in history, legend, and nature, and so show something of the life-history of the archetypes. Thus Miltonic similes, like Miltonic diction, contribute to the tightly-knit pattern of the whole poem, and serve to underline the unities rather than the diversities of the mythological world." pp 120

fire

"The result of assembling these varied instances is analogous to that produced by the modifiers surrounding Milton's important nouns: a broken image is reconstituted by fitting together the fragments that fallen man has been able to collect in his myths, and at the same time the status of the image as the original of and superior to all the fragments is established" pp 122-3

The Fallen Leaves go back to antiquity

"Sir Maurice Bowra, in showing that "the comparison of spirits in the underworld to fallen leaves is of great antiquity," lists instances from Bacchylides, Virgil, Dante's Inferno, and Tasso.4 In Milton's poem, the ancient image takes on a special poignancy and terror, because the remote occasion of all these falls — of spirits, men, leaves — is to be explored. The falling leaves signify the "change Of Seasons to each Clime" (x.677-78) wrought in the natural world by the sin of men. "

"From the standpoint of the simile — the Dark Ages — the Flood is a memory, in the scheme of the poem a forecast; so time is telescoped as the images are superimposed. There is also a dim reminiscence of the rebel angels congregating in the North. In addition, Milton's metaphor of Europe's "frozen loyns" is a kind of horrible parody on one of his favorite ideas, the fertility that comes from God and from God's symbol, the sun; it also anticipates the "perverse" breeding in Chaos (ii.625). The barrenness of the entire picture is reinforced in the geographical reference to a desert, the "Lybian sands." " pp 129

"Anyone who investigates Paradise Lost with the other poems and the prose close at hand will have forced upon him an awareness of Milton's remarkable imaginative consistency. "

Milton's private tradition of images consisting of: forests/labrynths, purgation...

"One step down from these full-scale comparisons with their widely-ranging allusions, we can find in Paradise Lost a wealth of lesser images, often undeveloped, where the references are rather to Milton's private "tradition": a body of imagery, woven through the earlier poems and the prose, that seems to have had special significance for him, finally reworked for its definitive incarnation in the great epic's mythic universe. An instance already touched on is the forest/labyrinth group.8 These images reflect, often, the well-known motifs of anthropology and legend, gaining added symbolic power from their contact with extra-personal meanings. " pp 133

"Shakespeare used also, of course, traditional analogies based on the "Elizabethan world picture," but in them, too, the areas of comparison (for example, the civil and natural hierarchies in the king/ sun metaphor) are parallel rather than concentric. Milton's worlds all fit exactly inside each other; in noting their points of similarity, he is not so much joining different objects as observing the same thing on a smaller or larger scale. " pp 142

Paradise, like chaos, is ebulient with potential, contradiction, good and evil

"Arnold Stein has observed that in Milton's first description of Eden there is a balance between light and dark, open field and unpierced shade; the light imagery of Paradise Lost is, of course, part of the pattern of ideas and images that conveys the cosmic war of creation against destruction, and is woven into the contrast between dead and living matter. " pp 151

FIRE encapsulates the "hell where I am" vs. Solitarie guide

"Satan approaches from Chaos, it is "this frail "World" (ii.1030); his first view is of something tiny and dependent:

And fast by hanging in a golden Chain This pendant world, in bigness as a Starr Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon. (ii. 1051-53)

The Earth is God's bauble, fitting spoil for the first thief. " pp 153

We understand Eden by way of what it is not. This is reinforced structurally by the sequencing of the books as well as the dissimile present in IV and V. NB Heaven shields the vulnerable paradise from hell.

The placement of of Book III is one of the most consequential structural decisions in the entire poem. It indicts God (Acc to Empson) and all the angels who interact with Adam and Eve

"The force of Books IV and V is great, even when they are read alone; but they never should be read alone, and are meant to be seen against the background of Hell, from which we have risen in the first books. The breathing airs, the spicy woods, moist earth and fresh vegetation of Eden are the positive equivalents of Hell's negations. The imagepattern— river, organism, scents, dance, fertile growth — constructed for Paradise is matched by a cluster of baleful images characterizing Hell. Two solid "places" are thus given shape and distinctively set off against each other to make visible two opposing forces. Critics who have complained that the typical note of Miltonic imagery is sounding brass are justified if they confine their attention to the first two books and the sixth. Milton is reproducing here "Noise, other then the sound of Dance or Song" (viii.243), and his imagery is tuned to it. The similes for the fallen angels, sharing the quality of destructiveness, reflect (or are reflected by) the barren waste of their "ill Mansion." They are surrounded by what St. Paul called "the unfruitful works of darkness." 27" pp 156

Prima Facie misogyny is tempered by rhetoric which elevates the feminine and denigrates the masculine

"The building of Pandemonium provides a first instance of its malignant power.

There stood a Hill not far whose griesly top Belch'd fire and rowling smoak; the rest entire Shon with a glossie scurff, undoubted sign That in his womb was hid metallic Ore, The work of Sulphur, (i.670-74)

The pronoun his for womb, though an accepted seventeenthcentury substitute for the neuter pronoun, nevertheless sets the soil of Hell sharply apart from "mother Earth," and suggests something of the unnaturalness of the process that is to follow. " pp 160

Satan's flight out of heaven. C.f. "shaman"

"In Books II to IV of Paradise Lost, Milton has given his version of one of the basic mythological themes: the quest, second stage of the "celestial cycle" of loss, search, and return. "The perpetual stumble of conjecture and disturbance in this our dark voyage" was portrayed earlier in the woodland wanderings of Comus. But the theme did not find its most profound incarnation until Satan voyaged out of Hell to light. His is a journey conjectural and disturbed enough, the original instance and subsequent type of fallen man's endeavor. Satan is the archetypal exile; the theme is transferred to man at the end of the poem, as the dark voyage of the race of Adam is adumbrated in the great panorama of Old Testament wanderings in the final books, which illustrate in history "the exile of temporal life."

Satan is not, obviously, the hero of Paradise Lost. But the story of his voyage is told by Milton as if he were one of the questing heroes of legend, while at the same time we are reminded of his position in the moral scheme of the poem as a whole" pp 179

[II.562-65]

"The double point of view is characteristic of irony, and the first three books of Paradise Lost together form one of the most sustained ironic passages in our literature. Irony is fundamentally tragic; it calls out simultaneously our sympathetic emotions and our critical intellects. Above all, the ironic vision of life refuses to permit a simple attitude. Hence, all arguments as to where our sympathies lie in the early books of Milton's epic are vain; they lie both with the follies of the fallen, and with the rigors of reason and discipline that are necessary for our salvation as reasonable beings. " pp 183

Whole paragraph is a nail in the coffin for decorum deniers

"The last variation on this theme [playing with connotation] comes in a passage from the final book. In it, Milton ties up neatly several threads of diction and imagery; it illustrates the nature of the journey and its goal. Jesus will quell

The adversarie Serpent, and bring back Through the worlds wilderness long wanderd man Safe to eternal Paradise of rest, (xii.312-14)

Every word is significantly connected with the mythological themes of the poem. "Bring back" suggests the circular journey; wilderness, with its reminiscence of the forest and the maze, along with safe, indicate its danger. Long brings in the temporal dimension necessary to this part of the myth. And in the last phrase, the time-ridden win eternity, the outcasts Eden, the tired wanderers rest. " pp 188

niphates maybe?

"Satan has been seeking a return to the immortal life he lost; and Milton includes in these lines a hint to more fortunate pilgrims that God's gifts, "well us'd," can lead to Paradise regained. Unregenerate, Satan brings his Hell with him. " pp 194-5

"There is a family resemblance between Milton's Sin and Death and the traditional personages of allegory to whom they stand as grandparents, and the similarity has tended to obscure their place in Paradise Lost. Johnson, who considered "this unskilful allegory . . . one of the greatest faults of the poem," recognized, though he did not applaud, the ««traditional character of Milton's figures.

To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are for the most part suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale and Victory hovers over a general or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more. To give them any real employment or ascribe to them any material agency is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to nonentity.17

Johnson's idea of allegory was, indeed, more circumscribed than it should have been; but more liberal standards cannot quite accommodate Milton's Sin under the conventional label of allegory, either. " pp 198

Sin and death

"With Eve's sin (that is, when, with a sinful act, Sin became "actual"), a part of the archetype is separated from itself, and the fragment lodged in the human soul. Henceforth, because sin will be so widespread, no single representation of her can be complete; Milton's is the last full-length portrait before the destruction of archetypes.18 " pp 199

wandfering

"just as significant mythologically are the passages in which Satan's voyage is transported to land, and the theme is carried by images of the quest in the desert.

Wandring this darksome Desart, as my way Lies through your spacious Empire up to light, Alone, and without guide, half lost, I seek What readiest path . . . (ii.973-76)

The major image of Book III is of Satan as a wilderness wanderer.

As when a Scout

Through dark and desart wayes with peril gone All night; at last by break of chearful dawne Obtains the brow of some high-climbing Hill . . . (iii.543—46)

After Book IV, the quest images cease, to resume after theFall when man, too, has become a wanderer. " pp 202

By faith he made hismelf known in the land of the stranger

"The endless Biblical pilgrimages related by Michael include Moses leading the Israelites, and Abraham,

Not wandring poor, but trusting all his wealth With God, who call'd him, in a land unknown, (xii. 133-34)

All these, taken together, telescope the theme of the life journey, which is to be continued through the generations until "long wanderd man" is brought safely home. " pp 206

"Milton's classicism is not a mere matter of allusions and similes; in the assertion of limit, he is most deeply classical. At the same time, he is most truly Christian, for human limitation is a corollary to the belief in a single infinity, God. " pp 211

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