Paradise Lost Crit Quotes

‘Reason is but choosing’ - intellectual freedom

Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

‘To justify the ways of G-d to men’

Milton, Book I

‘Man’s ability to make decisions is the animating idea behind every one of Milton’s works’

Klimt - animating idea

Milton renders impossible any simple, stable interpretation of the poem’s politics'

Herman politics

The nature of marriage was evidently an abiding concern for Milton

Foxley marrige

The complex relationship between Adam and Eve is at the core of his masterpiece

Foxley relationship

The allure of freewill is where the attractiveness and power of Satan’s character lies

Zeng freewill Satan

Her failure was primarily intellectual. His is moral

Evans failure

Milton’s deliberately ambiguous grammar + liquid syntax

Ricks liquid

Milton was expanding the terse account in Genesis to epic proportions

Bell terse account

The transition from innocence to sin can be felt very early on in the narritve

Bell innocence sin

Evil is an active, ever-present element

Bell evil

The central moral concern [of b9] is truth

Anna Fish concern

Satan can be read as a republican hero; G-d infallible and omnibenevolent, a tyrannical monarch

Klimt Monarch

Poetry uses a solid and treatable smoothness to paint out and describing whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime

Milton solid smoothness

Milton was ‘a true poet and of the devil’s party without knowing it’

William Blake on Milton Devil

[Freedom, whilst a theme is also] embedded in the very experience of reading it

Orlando Reade Freedom

‘All higher knowledge in her presence falls’

Adam to Raphael about Eve

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall

G-d on Adam, Book III

the invention of a barbarous age

Milton on rhyme

the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming

Milton on rhyming (II)

Written in the ashes of a failed revolution

Orlando Reade on Political Context

a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions.’

Milton, Areopagitica, 1644, Adam’s alternate creation

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven

Satan Book I