bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Poet and Satan in “Paradise Lost”
Authors: Riggs William G. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
Realizing that the desire to achieve “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme” offers a potential for sin, Milton employs parallels between the narrator of Paradise Lost and Satan to indicate his awareness that great endeavors, even his own, may be pridefully motivated. But he defines carefully the difference between his “advent'rous” singing and satanic overreaching. The sharp contrast between the narrator's dependence on divine guidance and Satan's claims of self-sufficiency is repeatedly asserted within the context of striking similarities: both poet and Devil undertake great adventures; both, dwelling in hostile darkness, soar toward light; both, in need of direction, seek guidance from light (holy Light, Uriel) and primal sources of hexaemeral knowledge (Urania, Uriel). Milton supports such general parallels by the repetition of specific details and by numerous verbal echoes. But Satan lies to Uriel, curses the sun, and, inverting the poet's creative impulse, invokes his proper muse in Chaos. The devils can sing; they pursue the philosophical issues with which Paradise Lost is concerned; they build “Monument [s] / Of merit high.” These satanic perversions of good mean more than that the devils are bad; they mean that man may be beguiled by some “fair appearing good.” A Solomon may fall “To Idols foul.” A poet exploring “things invisible to mortal sight” must humbly hope that he is not deluded, that all is “Hers who brings it nightly to [his] Ear.”
The Typological Structure of Milton's Imagery
Authors: Ulreich John C. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
The seeming abstractness of Milton's imagery results from its intellectual structure, particularly from the way metaphors are recreated through typological fulfillment. The letter of a pagan or Hebraic type is first analyzed, then reconstituted in a Christian spirit which contains it, as “the spiritual and rational faculty contains the corporeal.” Milton's imagery is not sacramental; neither is it simply abstract, for Milton re-creates his own incarnational symbolism by a process of analysis, purification, and reembodiment. Images function typologically according to the law of Coleridge's secondary Imagination, which first “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” In Sonnet 23, the shadowy image of Alcestis is transformed, through typological allusions, into a Christian reality. The same pattern recurs in Samson's final reply to the Philistine Officer and in Christ's Incarnation of the Word in Paradise Regained. The basis of analogy in Milton's poetry is moral and psychological. His images are often difficult to apprehend immediately, because their effect depends largely on a conscious awareness; they are, nonetheless, concretely metaphorical, because they are grounded in the psychic activity of the protagonist. By this means the dead letter of imagery is reborn in the spirit, whose active and saving faith embodies itself in works of poetry.
Milton's Antiprelatical Tracts: The Poet Speaks in Prose
Authors: Via John A. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
John Milton's tracts of 1641–42—harsh, satiric attacks on the corruption of the English church—are an extension and development of the major themes and principal imagistic patterns of his academic exercises and early poetry, particularly Prolusion 6, A Mask, Lycidas, and the Epitaphium Damonis. The tracts are overwhelmingly negative in their thrust, but largely overlooked are their significant positive elements. First, biblical apocalyptic imagery describes the national Christian regeneracy of England; this is a transfer of the visionary descriptions of apotheosis in the poetry to the concrete reality of the English historical situation. Second, this apocalyptic imagery describes individual Englishmen whose responses to God's grace in sum will lead to national regeneracy. Third, in a careful articulation of his view of the character and function of the divine Christian poet in his personal statements, Milton humbly offers himself as the type for the response of others, as a model for individual regeneracy which leads to national regeneracy. The tracts refine primary Miltonic concerns and show the intimate relation of his poetry and prose.
Milton's God: Authority in “Paradise Lost”
Authors: Low Anthony 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
Milton's God consistently evokes an unfavorable reaction in the modern reader, the result not so much of our emotional response to Christianity as of our antipathy to absolute authority. This response is ironic because Milton too opposed authority, but only usurped human authority, since from the perspective of Adam all men are brothers. Paradise Lost presents, in contrast to the abuse of authority in the world, a vision of God's ideal justice, corresponding to the vision of bliss in Eden. The manner of Milton's God has offended, but he speaks as he must: with absolute certitude, with spareness and logic, without recourse to metaphor or sensuous appeal. Nevertheless, his speeches are transcendentally poetic. The Father has been accused of lacking love, but the love which the Son embodies originates with the Father, and is the necessary basis in Paradise Lost for just power. Although the Father reveals little directly of what he is, he is defined by his Son and by his creatures: man, the animals, the physical universe. The human love of Adam and Eve, apparently in contention with divine love, actually depends on it for its existence. So the Father is defined by everything he creates; and what he creates is beautiful and good.
Milton and the Organicist Polemic
Authors: Lieb Michael 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
The pervasive influence of organicism in the Renaissance is especially discernible in religious controversies that distinguished between the visible and invisible church. In Milton's antiprelatical tracts, the body is seen from the points of view of liturgy, as reflected in the communion, and investiture, as reflected in the controversies regarding ministerial dress. Those controversies express symbolically the Puritan desire to “divest” and “tear” the body, on the one hand, and the Anglican desire to “invest” and keep it whole, on the other. Integral to the Puritan and Anglican responses to the church are their responses to the state. Whereas the Anglican impulse is to unite the political body and the ecclesiastical body under one head, the Puritan impulse is to sever the two bodies. Thus Milton associates the body politic with outward concerns, the body ecclesiastical with inward ones. When the two bodies are unnaturally joined, a monster results, and the body can only be re-formed and returned to health through proper amputation of the corrupt limbs. Milton's organicist views, therefore, reflect not a desire to destroy, as might be charged, but a desire to make whole.
Mythic Dialectic in the Nativity Ode
Authors: Kingsley Lawrence W. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
This poem traces a dialectic between Christian and pagan symbolism through their echoing and reechoing ideas and images. Milton scants the conventional Christmas narrative of Virgin and manger to treat the Incarnation's historical and conceptual circumstances. The birth of Christ opposes a new mythology to religions flourishing at the time, yet borrows substantially from them. Christianity thus reflects these religions in principle, but brings peace where there was disorder, music where there was discord, lightness in place of darkness, virtue instead of sin, glory instead of shame. Since the identity of Christ is formed from heathen prototypes, Milton works out a discordia concors in which Phaeton, Phoebus, Lucifer, Pan, and Hercules, together with the whole pantheon of dispossessed deities, collapse into the Christhead. This method of counterposing the pagan world, point for point, with spreading manifestations of Christ allows Milton to retain his predilection for classical heroes while still proclaiming their rejection.
The Pattern of Temptation in “Paradise Regained”
Authors: McAdams James R. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
The debate of Christ and Satan concerning “zeal and duty” to Israel is the most significant temptation in Paradise Regained. In it, Milton sums up the main themes, reveals the antagonists definitively, and foreshadows the remaining action and resolution. The sequence of temptations itself indicates that the matter of Israel is crucial: the episodes form a pattern whose organization highlights the Israel temptation. The pattern is derived from the symmetrical relating of the parts of the sequence through parallel and contrast. The first part or episode is related to the last, the second episode to the second-to-last, and so on, leaving the Israel debate alone unparalleled, and therefore emphasized, at the center of the pattern. This pattern imposes coherence upon the temptations and counterpoints previously defined patterns, enriching the poem's texture. It also places several episodes in new perspectives and enhances awareness of Milton's architectonic method.
THE CUNNING RESEMBLANCE
Authors: Rajan B. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to assess the importance of parody as a continuing element in the structure of Milton's poems. It considers first the extended oppositions marshaled around the area of decision in Comus. Parodic dispositions play a crucial part in defining these oppositions and in relating them to the central act of choice. The masque form allows a preliminary rehearsal in which the didactic kernel of the oeuvre can be elegantly choreographed. In Paradise Lost we see the massive and intricate structural elaboration of the principles expounded in the masque. The structures thus established enclose a human journey. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are the poems of this journey, with the emphasis, previously distributed more or less equally between the envelopment and the agents, now falling more heavily on the agents. The continuing and prominent presence of parody in Milton's structures and the decisive part it plays in setting those structures in motion indicate that Milton's use of parody amounts to more than a poetic technique or literary strategy. In Milton's work the structure is the issue and parody part of an education in the nature of understanding.
MILTON'S PARAPHRASE OF GENESIS: A STYLISTIC READING OF "PARADISE LOST", BOOK VII
Authors: Häublein Ernst 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
The essay tries to evaluate Milton's paraphrastic techniques in his adaptation of the biblical account of the Creation in Paradise Lost, Book VII. The structure of PL VII, 216-632 and Milton's way of distributing the quotations from the Bible among additions and amplifications are reassessed. His use of various Bibles emerges from a meticulous comparison between the quotations and possible sources. Milton prefers the Authorized Version over the Geneva Bible by a ratio of approximately 2:1. He also consults the Vulgate and adapts the glosses of the English Bibles. Milton modifies the sources considerably in order to express his view of the Creation as a dynamic and logically structured process. He avoids repetitions, employs idiosyncratic and poetic diction, emphasizes significant words through position, and connects distant passages by verbal echoes. The syntax evinces a marked tendency toward extended units not contained in the Bibles. Milton fuses and condenses different biblical verses, notably in his adaptation of the creation of man, where he lets Raphael address Adam directly for the first time. Milton's techniques of transforming his sources by synthesizing, poeticizing, and imposing his own style upon the account of the Creation are illustrated by tables.
THE DOUBLE TIME SCHEME IN "PARADISE REGAINED"
Authors: Chambers A. B. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
Paradise Regained in part depends on Milton's manipulations of two very different concepts of time and on the resulting interreactions of alternate chronologies for divine and human history. From one point of view, time is linear in its nature, and on the line are unique moments, never repeatable, when God chose to intervene in history. From another point of view, time is not linear but cyclic, always and necessarily repetitive as recurrent intervals replace one another. Milton employs linear time, since the Wilderness Temptation of Christ was a unique event, but he adds other moments to the line, some of which are unorthodox. Milton also uses repetitive time in an unusual way since his cycles spin round with enormous rapidity. The point is that linear and cyclic time schemes, divine plans and human experience, must be compatible with one another for the work of salvation to occur and for paradise to be regained. If so, then Milton's views in the poem, however idiosyncratically, approach those of the Anglican church. Indeed, the church's prayer for the Wilderness Temptation supplies a surprisingly satisfactory statement of one of Milton's meanings.
THE MOSAIC VOICE IN "PARADISE LOST"
Authors: Rosenblatt Jason P. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
A limited perception of Moses' relation to the epic narrator in Paradise Lost derives from the tendency to regard his brief role as hierophant in an early draft of a tragedy as a paradigm of his role in the great epic. Placing Moses within an exclusively neo-Platonic perspective and elevating him to virtually godlike status obscure the human features of the imperfect Minister of the Law. In fact, two distinct Moses traditions—the neo-Platonic and the typological—help to define Milton's epic voice. If the transition from Edenic perfection to sin in Paradise Lost is attended by a shift from predominantly neo-Platonic to predominantly typological symbolism, then these shifts might be assisted by our recognition of a changed emphasis upon the character of Moses. Though lines ought not be drawn too sharply, it is generally true that the epic voice depends on the neo-Platonic tradition of Moses as poet-illuminator in passages that describe a prelapsarian world. When the Fall of Man is evoked, the epic narrator exploits a complex typological conception of Moses as at once a symbol of Old Testament obscurity and a mediator who leads to Christ.
Milton and the Art of Landscape
Authors: Koehler G. Stanley 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
Milton's description of Eden, which is on one level the English countryside, on another the ideal place of legend, is on still a third level an elaborately developed landscape in the informal style of the seventeenth century, including effects which the eighteenth century would label “picturesque.” The ways in which Milton observed the theories of landscape design are seen in the general arrangement of the grounds; in the particulars of wall and prospect; in the handling of foliage and water; and in the consistent emphasis on mass and shade that is characteristic both of the baroque taste of the seventeenth century and of the picturesque taste of the eighteenth century, which Milton's example helped to determine. Still another dimension of the landscape experience, in Milton as in the Renaissance garden, is seen in the introduction of elements for moral and psychological, as opposed to purely aesthetic reasons. Milton's own concern to keep the garden in scale with its human occupants results in a consistent focus on the nuptial bower as the physical, narrative, and thematic center of the action. On a larger plane, the Garden of Eden is presented as the center of the cosmos itself. Through description that dwells on shade and moisture, trees and streams, Milton presents it as the ideal mean between those extremes of negation and fulfillment, destruction and perfection for which hell and heaven are the emblems.
The Civic Hero in Milton's Prose
Authors: Patterson Annabel 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
The heroic metaphors and allusions in Milton's prose have received little attention in their own right, having been subordinated to study of either his early epic plans or his mature rejection of classical epic. But following Milton's heroic language from pamphlet to pamphlet one finds a coherent and partly self-contained pattern. In wrestling with the problematical role of the intellectual in times of crisis, and in trying to define that role as heroic, Milton created a linguistic and metaphoric synthesis of action and contemplation which differs from the passive fortitude of the great poems. Its affinities are with Ciccro's definition of the orator, and with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics at the point where they lead into the Politics, rather than with the Book of Job; and its emphasis is on the hero as public benefactor. Developed in part to justify his decision to enter the church reform debates, Milton's synthesis is held defensively in the divorce pamphlets, actively in the Areopagitica; set aside for political expediency in the regicide pamphlets, it is triumphantly restated in the Second Defence; and finally, in the Pro Se Defensio, Milton found it crumble in his hands. When Milton dropped out of politics, his civic heroism had become impossible to maintain, not only because of the Restoration, but because, as his language reveals, his confidence in his own impartiality and unselfishness had been destroyed.
The Rhetor as Creator in “Paradise Lost”
Authors: Shawcross John T. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
In Paradise Lost Milton simulates the role of the creator by certain rhetorical aims and techniques: Milton's creation is to aid the replenishment of heaven with true, faithful, and loving spirits by asserting God's great love seen in his eternal providence and by countering the antiheroic element that sees God as unjust and tyrannic. The complexity of Milton's simulated creation of a world is seen in the poem's intricate structures; its philosophical technique is sustained by the literary device of opposites, each of which moves from one extreme to the other and which together create the vagueness of distinction between them which is characteristic of man's thought. His world, like God's, is ever changing: the techniques to emphasize this are the compounding of time, the “harassing” of the reader, the manipulation of language, the structure of the poem, alterations in style. But over all is a persistent threat of truth. The contrast between the first (in man's mind) and the second (in God's mind) is seen in Satan, who is a Steppenwolf wishing to become an Everyman. The world's problems owe much to Everyman's (Adam and Eve's) becoming Steppenwolf. Milton's thesis is: experience is fulfilled in living, not after death, if we accept life as it is.
“A FREE AND OPEN ENCOUNTER”: MILTON AND THE MODERN READER
Authors: Landy Marcia 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
Literature embodies not universal or essential truths, but ideas and values which, like the reader's own, are conditioned and limited by history. Thus, Milton's views of authority relations, power, marriage, kinship relations, dominance and subordination, and his use of typification to define normative and deviant behavior, are subject to evaluation, rejection, or acceptance in the light of modern conceptions, drawn partly from anthropological and sociological research. In Satan and his women characters, Milton struggles to reconcile mutuality, hierarchy, and individual action. Eve's relation to Satanic deviancy, her learning of prescribed roles, and her acceptance of familial and domestic responsibilities define the woman's sphere in Paradise Lost. Similarly circumscribed, the Lady in Comus affirms community, sociability, and culture. The portrait of Dalila defines proper conjugal relations in terms of female subordination and service. Besides illuminating historical attitudes toward women, these characterizations compel the reader to question the presence of “universal truths” in Milton or any literature.
CONTIGUITIES AND MOVING LIMBS: STYLE AS ARGUMENT IN “AREOPAGITICA"
Authors: Smallenburg Harry R. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
Milton presents his forceful argument against censorship in a form that dramatizes the nature of the truth humans must not attempt to suppress. Sentences in the introduction have “broken” syntactical patterns; the explicit order of arguments becomes confused and the divisions are blurred as reasons overlap from section to section; flights of “inspired” rhetoric seem to appear randomly; finally, the imagery toward the end of the tract represents truth as fragmented and incomplete. Although critics have seen a disparity between the intuitive, imaginative persuasiveness of the tract and a logical, discursive weakness, both kinds of argumentation are actually integrated and suggest that truth, which has a divine life of its own, must be allowed to appear freely, unconstrained by the necessarily limited forms and perceptions of human beings.
"THE WARS OF TRUTH": WISDOM AND STRENGTH IN “AREOPAGITICA"
Authors: Whitaker Juanita 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
Milton's epistemology, embodied in the image of the warfaring Christian who dialectically struggles with truth and error alike, informs all arguments in Areopagitica. The wisdom-and-strength topos provides a model for understanding a range of images which support this theme. For Milton, complete wisdom and strength is man's dedicated struggle to know God's truth, and the occasion of the treatise clearly manifests the topos: Books (wisdom) are fighting (strength) to exist in England. The book metaphor admits the full epistemological scope of a free press: Society has all options for positive or perverted wisdom and strength. Censorship, however, is both a violent act (perverted strength) and a fear of ideas (intellectual weakness). His own heroic wisdom and strength is revealed in Milton's courage in voicing Areopagitica, which itself affirms the wisdom and strength of language and celebrates the power of the word.
“She May Have More Shapes Than One”: Milton and the Modern Idea That Truth Changes
Authors: Long Anne B. 
Published: May 2022

ABSTRACT
Recent ideas about how science operates suggest a new approach to the way in which John Milton assimilated the impact of the Copernican Revolution. Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms suggests Milton's characterization of God's progressive revelation of truth and the implications Milton depicts in his epic for the individual. Kuhn describes any given scientific framework of thought as an allegory which is “true” only in the sense that it permits creative work. Controversies in science lead to new formulations of truth. When contradiction arises, individuals should wait patiently for the new paradigm. Milton similarly believes that God accommodates truth to man's abilities. Areopagitica suggests that truth changes and that conflicts between opposing truths lead to a wider vision. Be Doctrina details the radically different characteristics of God's dispensations. In Paradise Lost, Milton feels free to choose the scientific paradigm which allows him creativity. He depicts conflicts between characters who have explored fully their particular dispensations and who must acknowledge at the moment of conflict the need for a wider truth. Because the creature can never know absolute truth, his patient waiting must be prompted and sustained by a positive and soul-testing allegiance to truth.