Paradise Lost Critical Comments

Shelley

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

Leonard

‘Satan’s character ‘rots away’ when he strikes at God through Adam and Eve’

Steadman

‘The Satan image is, to be sure, the portrait of a false heroism, an eidolon of the true heroic virtues’

Saurat

‘Milton throws himself personally into the struggle against Satan’

C.S. Lewis

‘Seeing God as malevolent or Satan as attractive is simply an indication of a Fallen State’

Revard

‘Neither God’s foreknowledge nor Satan’s temptings excuse Adam and Eve’

Revard

‘To require Eve’s obedience without free choice would be to destroy the liberty of Eden’

Revard

‘Eve needed no more than a zealous love for God to protect her from Satan’s lies’

McColley

‘Even though we know the outcome, Eve is characterised so that it need not have happened - our foreknowledge does not touch the freedom of her will’

Bowers

‘pride that sets her in opposition to Adam and leads to the Fall’

Hurden

‘wants a powerful argument for Eve in order not to make Adam look a fool’

Bowers

‘Adam is more guilty than Eve because he fails in his divinely appointed task as her protector, head, and guide’

C.S. Lewis

‘Adam fell by uxoriousness’

Greenlaw

‘To both, the poet is a teacher’

Empsom

‘disobedience of God is a positive act that rescues mankind from an unvarying routine of genuflection and makes possible the glorious and distinctively human search for self-knowledge and knowledge of the Truth’

Johnson

‘Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it’

C.S. Lewis

'‘fails to convince us that Adam and Eve are happy’

Holly Hanford

‘[The tragedy’s] intensity is necessarily lessened by the requirements of the broader narrative and by the co-existence of a didactic and philosophic purpose’