“Milton’s place in the canon is permanent, even though he appears to be the major poet at present most deeply resented by feminist literary critics”

“Paradise Lost is magnificent because it is persuasively tragic as well as epic; it is the tragedy of the fall of Lucifer into Satan, though it declines to show us Lucifer, lightbearer and son of the morning, chef of the stars that will fall”

What makes Paradise Lost unique is its startling blend of Shakespearean tragedy, Virgilian epic, and Biblical prophecy. The terrible pathos of Macbeth joins itself to the Aeneid’s sense of nightmare and to the Hebrew Bible’s assertion of authority. That combination should have sunk any literary work nine fathoms deep, but John Milton, blind and battered by political defeat, was unsinkable. There may be no larger triumph of the visionary will in Western literature.

No, Book II makes it clear that Milton was fully aware of this debt and worked to excise the bard’s influence from his verse. Taht is the entire point of this book. That’s not to say that he succeeds, since the similarities to other villains of English literature are inescapable, which Bloom does succeed in illustrating – but to say that Milton did not consciously recognize this and then to characterize this presumed failure on his part as baffling is more work than Occam’s razor: to simply state that he know, was troubled by it, and thus wrote Book II

As a rule, the converse of Hanlon’s razor applies to Milton: Do no attribute to malice what could be attributed to incompetence. Do attribute it to malice. A reading of PL which does not permit an iota of incompetence is both likely and more enriching than the reading which asserts that Milton “simply did not mean it” or “did not recognize his debt to Shakespeare” or “did not understand that his portrayal of God as a big meanie” inhibits his genius

As a limner of night pieces, Satan owes everything to Iago and Macbeth, Hamlet and Edmund. / We must assume that Milton did not consciously recognize the debt, though it is baffling that he did not. The Miltonic representation of Satan’s ambivalence toward God, like the Freudian representation of primal ambivalence, is wholly Shakespearean, founded upon Iago’s ambivalence toward Othella, Macbeth’s toward his own Oedipal ambition, and Hamlet’s toward everything and everyone, himself most of all

No, again that’s the point. HE makes his task of justifying the wayes of god to men that much more challenging for himself by figuring God as incomprehensible and even unjust or mean to demonstrate that despite all that, our fallen perception of him is best served by obedience

“The republican Milton would presumably have rejected our feeling that we hear the rhetoric of tyranny when his God speaks, since the PRotestant God was the only legitimate monarch for the poet of Paradise Lost. Still, Milton has made God sound more like James I or Charles I than like David or Solomon, let alone than like Yahweh of the J writer. Something is very wrong with Milton’s God, as with his warlike Messiah who leads the heavenly charge in the Chariot of Paternal Deity.”

“‘... but not so waked … himself impaired’ This is a most un-Shakespearean evasion; we want to hear it dramatized, just as we want to see Lucifer before he dwindles forever. In flight from Shakespeare, Milton represses the dramatic moment of his her-villain’s transformation. After all, Raphael is wrong, it is Lucifer who thinks himself impaired, and we are irked by the party line that tells us Lucifer is no an unperson named Satan”

Reference this in the discussion about Lucifer or the lack thereof in Book V

Thirty-five or so lines on, presumably added to the original speech, seems like the likeliest answer: “Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell;” - the first line overtly revises Marlowe’s Mephistopheles: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,”

What now appears in the poem as book 4, lines 32-47, would have opened the tragedy. Satan, on top of Mount Niphates at the origin of the Tigris River, has a prospect of the Garden of Eden and directly addresses the blazing sun, in the accents of a Jacobean hero-villain remembering the pathos of the Marlovian overreachers: “O thou that with … matchless king.” In the surviving drafts of an outline for Adam Unparadised, there is no character named Satan; there is only Lucifer. This passage is our one clue to the character from whom Satan fell away

The entirety of Paradise Lost takes place in the comparatively infinitesimal slice of time after lucifer, but before Jesus. Bookended by the respective eternities of all prehistory and the everything that stretches on till the monistic convergence towards a monistic, unified body of God All in All.

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