Critics For paradise lost Flashcards
Tillyard
“From first to last Eve takes and keeps the initiative… Adam on the other hand is unprepared, laborious and on the defensive…And then comes the tragedy. Adam, who Eve expects to be firm, suddenly weakens”
Empson
“Milton thought that Men aught to control Women but that would make him feel all the more outraged when Eve turns round and blames Adam for having let her go”
Burden
‘By granting her permission, Adam becomes involved in what happens to her”
Sandra Gilbert
How the woman’s “otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods” (but none of this is present at all)
Diane McColley
“He casts scorn on the traditional epic hero’s acquisitive will to power….He ridicules the notion that one can pursue fame and glory by flinging hardware and maiming flesh”
“Milton chooses instead to show Eve and Adam in their dialogues both capable, in proportion , of all sorts of virtue.”Traditional ‘manly’ virtues…and ‘womanly’ ones…are not strictly divided between them”
Weston
“Eve is now well into an irretrievable situation: her passions, as a result of flattery, are ruling her reason”
“Eve really believes she has acted in the best interests of herself, and by extension of Adam”
John Carey
“Satan is superior in character to Milton’s God”
“Milton’s effort to encapsulate evil in Satan was not successful.”
C.S.Lewis’ PHAT par
C.S.Lewis: “She thinks that Earth is a long way from Heaven and God may not have seen her; the doom of nonsense is already at work…But presently she remembers that the fruit may, after all, be deadly. She decides that if she is to die, Adam is to die with her…I am not sure that critics always notice the precise sin Eve is now committing, yet there is no mystery about it. It’s English name is murder.”
“can do no good to Eve (as in fact, he does no good) by becoming her accomplice…The only thing Adam knows is that he must hold the fort, and he does not hold it”
“{She} who thought it beneath her to worship either Adam or God came to worship a vegetable”
Broadbent
we cling to the one positive act in the episode, Adam’s eating the apple, regarding it with Eve as an unarguably good affirmation of their love. In fact, like all postlapsarian actions, [our view] is infected by its sinful ground. the love it affirms is not free, for Eve has demanded it by dilemma”
Fowler
“In a sense Adam becomes corrupt because he refuses to divorce Eve: because he wants solace at any price”
“The implication is that Satan, besides talking persuasively, is acting a part; and that each feature of his performance could be given an unattractive definition”
Williams
Williams: “When Adam, in the fullness of his passion for Eve, really does abandon heaven and his knowledge of God for her, Milton denounces his act. But it was , after all, Milton who imagined his passion so intensely as to make us almost wish that it could be approved”
Milton on tyrants and freedom
Milton The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: “indeed none can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence; which never hath more scope or more indulgence then under Tyrants”
Blake on Milton writing about Devils
Blake: “the reason Milton wrote in fetter when he wrote of Angels and God, and at Liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”
Hands and mutuality contrast between book 4 and book 9
4: “hand in hand handed” and 9: “seizes her hand”
4: “mutual love, mutual help” and 9: “mutual guilt”
Christopher Hill
“Milton specifically compared the marriage contract to the political contract between king and people.”
