Critics for Paradise lost Flashcards
John Milton
“To Justify the ways of god to man”
William Blake
“of the devils party without knowing it”
Diane.K. Mccalley
“Milton broke the stereotypical scapegoating of eve as a temptress”
Joseph Swetnam
“straight away her mind was set upon mischief”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Miltons Devil as a moral being is far superior to his God”
Stanley Fish
“seeing God as malevolent or Satan as attractive is a sign of our fallen state”
C.S. Lewis (‘a preface to PL’)
“it is a mistake to find rebellion admirable: Satan is not a heroic figure and Eve’s transgression is lamentable”
C.S. Lewis (Eve)
“Eve is a murderess”
C.S. Lewis (Satan)
“Satan undergoes a progressive degradation from God’s second in command to a mere peeping tom”
C.S. Lewis (Satan 2)
“all his … torments come, in a sense, at his own bidding”
William Empson
“surely a lot of characteristics in fiction … become pretty dull if the orthodoxy is always right”
D.K. Mccalley
(Milton identifies with Eve in her) “plea for freedom and a little solitude”
Voltaire
“in all other poems love is perceived as a vice, in Milton only, is it a Virtue”
Tillyard
Milton “fails to convince us that Adam and Eve are happy”
Caroline Moore
“Satan has all the virtues of an Achilles: undaunted courage, charisma, and magnificent rhetoric”
Lewalski
“subtly compliments those rational powers where in she knows herself inferior to Adam”
John Carey
“Milton’s effort to encapsulate evil in Satan was not successful”
Barbara Lewalski
“by measuring Satan against heroic standards, we become conscious of the inadequacy and fragility of all heroic virtues celebrated in literature, of the susceptibility of them to all demonic perversion”
AN Wilson
“Milton could scarcely write about rebellion without secretly being on the side of the rebels”.
Dr Samuel Johnson
(Milton) “He thought women only made for obedience, and man for rebellion”.
Susanne Woods (1988)
“Milton was never comfortable with human hierarchy. (The republican who abhorred an aristocratic system that gave authority by happenstance of birth to kings and princes could not be perfectly at ease with a gender hierarchy also dependent on birth”)
Abdullah F. Al-Badarneh
“privileges her as an active agent in the social communicative process.”
John Dryden (not qoute)
Satan, who disdains servitude and tries to overturn his monarch, becomes in Dryden’s rewriting an unmistakeable portrait of Oliver Cromwell, the king-killer.
Waldock
“adam falls through love, not through sensuality”
felix culpa
“happy fall”
