AO3 Flashcards
Forsyth - Satan’s humanity
“The heroic public persona becomes a troubles private self. The sudden glimpse of that personal, intimate interior increases the closeness of the reader to Satan.”
Forsyth - Hell as a creation of Satan’s mind
“The effect of the mingling of Satan’s thought and perception here is to render the Hell that he perceives the product of that thought”
“Hell is both a place and a state of mind”
Forsyth - portraying inwardness
“Shakespeare and his contemporaries had learned new ways to represent inwardness and now Milton extends their techniques.”
Burke - the effect of many Epic Similes
“The mind is hurried out of itself, by a crowd of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused.”
Hartman - free will
“the poem’s larger agenda to reinforce our faith in the graceful co-existence of free-will & divine providence”
Fish - human perspective
“we are fallen…have imperfect perceptions”
Coleridge & Hartman - Milton’s position
Ab-extra - the simile stands ab-extra from the narrative and Milton stands ab-extra to the simile, “tendency to stand ab-extra” position to pass a moral judgement
Hartman - similes
Counterplot - 3rd movement of the simile = hidden narrative
Baumlin - heroism
“classical heroism is devalued rather than affirmed”
Baumlin - pride
Satan the embodiment of Pride
Waldock - Satan speeches
” there is hardly a great speech of Satan’s that Milton is not at pains to correct, to damp down and neutralise”
Blake - Milton
“he was a true poet and of the Devils party without knowing it”
Shelley - Milton’s god vs his devil
“Milton has so far violated the proper creed … as to have alleged no superior of moral virtue to his God over his Devil”
Fish - Satan’s eloquence
“the weakness all men evince in the face of eloquence”
Hartman - similes - disagreeing with Fish
Similes grant the reader something like the perspective of eternity/divine perspective – window into the world of Satan
