Epic Characteristics of Miltons Paradise Lost :: Epics Milton Paradise Lost Essays

Paradise Lost is one of the finest examples of the epos tradition in all of literature. In composing this extraordinary work, John Milton was, for the most part, hobby in the manner of big poets of past centuries Barbara Lewalski notes that Paradise Lost is an grand whose closest structural affinities atomic number 18 to Virgils Aeneid . . . she continues, however, to state that we now recognize as well the influence of epic traditions and the presence of epic features other than Virgilian. Among the verses Homeric elements are its Iliadic subject, the death and woe resulting from an act of disobedience the portrayal of deuce as an Archillean hero motivated by a sense of injure merit and also as an Odyssean hero of wiles and craft the description of Satans risky Odyssey to find a new homeland and the battle scenes in heaven. . . . The poem also incorporates a Hesiodic gigantomachy numerous Ovidian metamorphoses an Ariostan Paradise of Fools and Spenserian allegorical fi gures (Sin and Death) . . . . (3)There were changes, however, as John M. Steadman farms clear The regularity with which Milton frequently conforms to principles of epic structure make his occasional (but nevertheless fundamental) variations on the epic tradition all the to a greater extent striking by contrast. The most important departures from epic decorum--the rejection of a warriorlike theme, and the choice of an argument that emphasizes the heros transgression and defeat instead of celebrating his virtues and triumphs--are paradoxically knowledgeable by concern for the ethical and religious decorum of the epic genre. On the whole, Milton has retained the formal motifs and devices of the idealistic poem but has invested them with Christian weigh and meaning. In this sense his epic is . . . something of a pseudomorph--retaining the form of classical epic but replacing its values and contents with Judeo-Christian correlatives. (Epic and Tragic social organization . . . 2 0) Steadman goes on to defend Miltons changes in the form of the epic, saying that such revaluations are not unusual in the epic tradition they were in concomitant inevitable (20). It is important, before continuing with an examination of Paradise Lost and its epic characteristics and conventions (specifically, those in Book I), to review for a moment exactly what an epic is. Again, according to Lewalski, Renaissance critics generally thought of epics as long poems treating heroic actions or other weighty matters in a high style, thereby evoking awe or wonder (12).