On Mr. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Andrew Marvell
- First Published: 1674
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Authors or writers, Blindness or blind persons, Poetry or poets, England or English people, Seventeenth century, Hell, Heaven
The Poem
Andrew Marvell’s poem chronicles his reactions to the artistic merit of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) in seven verse paragraphs of fifty-four rhymed iambic pentameter lines. The opening sentence forms a grammatical unit of ten lines. The remaining lines, marked with a grammatical pause at the end of each couplet, follow the poetic practice of end-stopped couplets.
Initially, Marvell contrasts Milton’s “slender Book” with its “vast Design,” its Christian topic of salvation history and its cosmic scope of infinite time and space. He fears...
[The entire page is 1516 words long]
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