Critics of Paradise Lost Flashcards
Susan Cotton
fortunate fall
Paradise Lost is the education of Adam
they could never have progressed if they had stayed in the garden
Adam made an idol of Eve
John Evans
The Story could well be read as an image of the transition from childhood to maturity
One of the reasons Satan is so interesting is that he is so complicated. His goal, to make a game of others makes his existence entirely dependent on theirs; when he is alone, he is a nullity.
John Rogers
This poem has been arguing with itself. Eve exposes the ideological contradictions at the heart of Milton’s Eden.
There is an organic, natural necessity to the fall. The imposition of law (doctrinal hierarchy or arbitrary imposition) does not control disorder, it produces disorder (creates contrasting desire to subvert restriction). The imposition has to be broken.
Shelley
Milton’s devil, as a moral being is… far superior to his God
St Augustine
Adam and Eve must already have fallen before they could do the evil deed
Evil is just the absence of good
Waldock
blank virtue of prelapsarian man
“trapped” between the notion of a tragic fall and his abhorrence of a cloistered virtue
the coming of thought into the world “with the fall” (I would argue the opposite, now reason has been usurped halting man’s quest to become as rationally moral as the angels and making him slave to his primal nature)
circumstance caused Eve’s sin to a large extent, mitigates her responsibility by citing bad luck as a major cause of her fall
Danielson
The fall seems fortunate only when redemption is considered together with the incarnation
Joan S. Bennet
Milton’s antinomianism
The Separation scene - Adam telling Eve ‘Go’
Stella P. Revard
Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility
Abdiel etc.
The heroic context of book 9: Adam parody of tragic hero ‘pseudo-martyr , Satan parody of military hero ‘anti-hero’, The Son as the true Christian and Classical hero
Swaim
the maze
Lionel Trilling
we “abhor” the “infantile passivity” of the concept of Eden. “We dread Eden”
