Paradise Lost critical quotations

Man’s ability to reason and make decisions is “the animating

idea behind every one of Milton’s works” — Klimt

“aspiration and heroic knowledge are the sources not only of sin and woe

but also of poetic strength, the substance of epic and tragedy” — Orgel and Goldberg

“Milton renders impossible any simple, stable

interpretation of the poem’s politics” — Herman

The poem “does not immediately resolve the

problems it raises” — Belsey

“The nature of marriage was evidently an

abiding concern for Milton” — Foxley

“The complex relationship between Adam and Eve is

at the core of his masterpiece” — Foxley

It is ‘misguided’ to focus on who the epic hero is; ‘it

is the nature of heroic activity that Milton is interested in’ — Edwards

“The allure of free will is where the

attractiveness and power of Satan’s character lies” — Zeng

[About Adam’s decision to fall with Eve] “The moment we applaud

Adam’s actions we are directly implicated in it ourselves.” — Bell

“Her failure was primarily intellectual. His

is moral.” — Evans

Adam has to not “choose good over evil, loyalty over

disloyalty, but to decide between conflicting loyalties” — Orgel and Goldberg

“Adam and Eve are not in possession of enough information or

experience to enable them to make a free choice” — Orgel and Goldberg

“Adam attacks Eve for all the weaknesses of women chronicled in

antifeminist tracts” — Miller

“Adam is superior to Eve but

he does not initially assert his authority” — Sims

“Adam is too trusting of Eve, taking the fruit

she offers to him, and too devoted” — Sims

“For Milton exercising self-restraint was a choice too, but he knew

how deeply it runs counter to our human need to prove ourselves in action” — Moore

Satan “confronts Eve with a barrage of definition,

false syllogisms and rhetorical questions” — Lewalski

Satan “subtly compliment[s] those rational

powers wherein she knows herself inferior to Adam” — Lewalski

“Milton would have said that Eve did not know

why she fell, anymore than we do” — Empson

“Eve fell through

pride” — C.S. Lewis

PL is “a work able to sustain many seemingly

contrary interpretations” — Bell

Milton’s deliberately ambiguous grammar + “liquid

syntax” — Ricks

“The mind cannot accept the fact that perfection

was capable of corruption without denying the absoluteness of perfection” — Bell

“This bridge [across the fall]

is the temptation” — Bell (Idea that Milton readily accepted the Genesis story, so it does not trouble him as it would us)

According to Paul Elmer, the theme of Milton’s

poem is the lost Paradise

“Milton’s cast of mind was towards the present

condition of humankind” — Bell

Milton was “expanding the terse account

in Genesis to epic proportions” — Bell

PL maybe fails as a theodicy, as Bell says that we should analyse PL

“through the effects of temptation rather than with causes”

Milton wanted to understand “the fallen state itself”

because “it was his state, and it is our own” — Bell

Reasons for the fall according to different contemporary critics:

(Contemporary critics take the biblical account of Genesis less literally than Milton did, which is why they are left with far more questions)

Greenlaw: Triumph of unreason over temperance

Hanford: Sensuality over asceticism

Tillyard: Mental levity over self knowledge

“The transition from innocence to sin can be felt

very early in the narrative” (Bell)

Tillyard: The Fall “must be extended back in time;

it has no plain and sensational beginning” —> garden is already overgrown + Eve is vain from the start of Book IX

“By blurring the transition from innocence to experience

as he does, Milton changes the significance of his plot entirely” (Bell)

“Evil is an active, ever-present

element” (Bell)

Milton “deliberately complicates the evidence of his

narrative to include the manifold nature of Eve and Adam’s failures” (Bell)

Like Satan, Eve “proposes that experience

is a necessary ingredient of virtue” (Bell) —> links to Areopagitica, suggests that Eve has some satanic qualities pre Fall

Book IX closes with the “sound of their

pitiably and unmistakably human quarreling” — Bell

“The central moral concern [of B9]

is truth” — Anna Fish

“Before the Fall Adam and Eve could not

imagine the snake was lying, but after it they could imitate his methods” — Baldwin

“Milton gives Satan the language and gestures

of both radical and royalist rebellion” — Loewenstein

“A substratum of doubt about all political certainties explored in Milton’s earlier

work runs underneath PL, and this incertitude erupts in Milton’s epic similes and metaphors” — Herman

“The reason Milton wrote in fetters 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.” — Blake

“Milton’s Devil as a moral being

is far superior to his God” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Satan “can also be read as a republican hero; God, infallible and

omnibenevolent, a tyrannical monarch” — Klimt

Milton “requires his reader to make constant and careful judgements

about a story we already think we know” — Klimt

“Milton’s deeply loving and

empathetic portrait of Satan” — Nicolson

“Failure is

part of his allure” — McGuinness

“Satan evokes many readers’ sympathy both because of what he says

about himself and of what the narrator, perhaps not quite intentionally reveals about him” — Forsyth

Milton “did not scruple

to give the devil his due” — Hazlitt

“Satan’s intelligence and his emotional intensity make the reader challenge

the meaning of good and evil” — Forsyth

“Satan may not be a hero in the epic sense, but it is hard to deny him of the

status of a tragic hero” — Forsyth

Satan was created by God but fell —> “evil is something chosen, acting

through free will in conscious opposition to God’s will” — Zeng

“The allure of free will is where the attractiveness

and power of Satan’s character lies” — Zeng

“Satan is charismatic, tempting

the reader as he did Eve to think, to question” — Zeng

“The ‘hot hell that always in him burns’ […] represents Satan’s freedom:

this is a hell of Satan’s own choosing and creation” — Zeng

Satan’s mind is “unconquerable and unconditionally

opposed to God” — Zeng

“Milton wants his readers to struggle precisely so

that we can sharpen our critical faculties” — Klimt

According to Milton, without free will Adam would have been an

“Adam in the motions”

Adam and Eve’s “perfection is a ‘vibrato’ because it wavers above and below

the ideal line. In this dynamic, God is the only constant” — Edwards

St Paul: “To the pure, all things are pure”

• Mirrors Adam and Eve’s unfallen state

• God’s preemptory prohibition of the fruit is troublingly analogous to the licensor’s preemptory banning of the Areopagitica

“I cannot praise

a fugitive and cloistered virtue” — Milton

“It is Adam’s duty to remind her of her place. The reason he doesn’t is

because his feelings are more like a lover’s than a husband’s”— Evans

“There is an intellectual affinity between

the pamphlet and the poem” — White

St Paul: “Wives, submit

yourselves unto your husbands”

“Nature itself is weakened, put out

of order, wounded” — Ames

“Disobedience is equivalent

to disorder” — Bell