Paradise Lost Critics

 ‘‘A fallen, free-thinking world is better than one in which mankind is 'stupidly good' ‘‘

McEvoy, partly a quote from book ix

‘‘heroic rhyme is the noblest kind of modern verse’’

Dryden - english poet laureate supporter of the monarchy (maybe milton saw rhyme as obedience to the monarchy whom he believed had not truly served the people) said that rhyme is the best thing ever, Milton went on to defend his choice of blank verse as recovering the liberty of the epic form

‘‘little more than puppets going through the motions of autonomy but in reality not free’’

Klimt about adam and eve if they had no free will

‘‘Eve in Paradise Lost is vain, vulnerable and evidently intellectually inferior to Adam’’

Gilbert

‘‘puts her on a par with Satan in her refusal to accept hierarchy and her ability to move the plot of Paradise Lost forward’’

Gilbert

‘‘however wicked Satan’s plan may be it is God’s plan too’’

Empsom

‘‘human passion did not enter the world before the fall’’

Johnson

‘‘Satan always borrows God’s patterns’’

this suggests that Satan's actions and strategies are imitations of divine order. Mulder

‘‘Either, God has no freedom of choice… or, God‟s acts are good because he does them, which makes them mere arbitrary opinion’’

Emerson - Milton suggests that actually God’s justice is good because he decrees it to be as he is omniscient and whilst in part this could be that the actions are good Milton advocates the concept that ultimately God’s judgement is far superior, far more merciful and far more fair than we can perceive because of the limitlessness of his knowledge

‘‘Eve is more ambitious, rebellious and disobedient than Adam’’

Gilbert

“he was a true poet of the Devil’s party without knowing it”

Blake

Satan persevered towards his goal ‘‘in spite of adversity and torture”

Shelley, about Satan saying he is morally superior to God

‘‘the relationship between her and Adam depends on their mutual relationship with the Eden itself’’

Mattison

‘‘forces Eve to think she is losing equality when actually she never had true equality in the garden’’

sayed

there is ‘‘a fundamental clash…between what the poem asserts on the one hand, and what it compels us to feel, on the other… Paradise Lost does not profoundly satisfy us..it cannot because of the embedded ambiguity at the heart of it’’

Waldock

‘‘the more life Milton could put into our feelings about Satan the better but his main business was to convey the whole range of feeling inherent in the myth and the myth clearly involves contradictions’’

Empson

‘‘God is victor, but he is victor on the term of Satan’s instrumentality’’

Cope

‘‘Evil is inherent in creation’’

Norford

‘‘we are led to believe that obedience to God’s injunctions are perfectly consistent with free will whilst almost every important scene makes us doubt the logic of this principle’’

Hyman