Paradise Lost Critic Quotes (AO5)

Shelley (1821)

‘Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God’

CS Lewis (1942)

‘We need not doubt that it was the poet’s intention to be fair to evil’

Gibney (2012)

‘God is represented as a vengeful tyrant’

Edwards (2018)

Satan’s appearance as the serpent is ‘the condition of the unrepentant fallen creature’

His thoughts consistently circle back to the same thing like the coil of a serpent.

Gilbert (2018)

Eve ‘implicitly refuses to accept the hierarchy of Eden’

Sartre’s theory of existentialism (20th century)

Freedom is not as liberating as it seems, since it forces humans to bear full responsibility for their choices

1. McEvoy (2013)

‘it is a Christian Epic’

2. McEvoy (2013)

‘Modern heroism is not to fight and kill, but to take responsibility for one’s actions’

Moore (2012)

‘It is not her presence that undoes Adam, so much as her absence and the prospect of her loss’