Paradise Lost IX Critics (AO5) Flashcards
Waldock
“Milton felt the essence of life is struggle”
Vendler - God
“God establishes a single test, giving his creatures the power to choose for or against the good.”
Schwarz - Satan
“The quality that emerges most consistently in the portrayal of Satanic mastery is that it is false.”
CS Lewis
Satan as “a personified self-contradiction”
CS Lewis 2
“Eve fell through pride”
Blake - Milton
Milton was “Of the Devil’s party without knowing it”
Empson - God
Milton is “struggling to make his God appear less wicked than the traditional Christian god”
Lewalski - Adam
“Adam only falls because she does”
Lewalski 2 - Satan
Satan’s five soliloquies “associate him with the flawed protagonists of the Elizabethan stage”
Lewalski 3 - God
“a grotesque black comedy of God’s devising”
Fish - Satan
“the reader is first seduced by Satan’s powerful and impressive logic, then slowly realises that the logic is in fact twisted and nonsensical”
Turner
“Milton both uses contemporary assumptions about women and is in conflict with them”
Milton
“Who can be ignorant that woman was crated for man, and not man for woman?”
Rottenburg
“Man chooses to be obedient to Satan instead” [not the cause for Eve?]
McColley
“He was probably more serious about the relations of the sexes…than any poet of or before his time…perhaps of any poet at any time.”
