Paradise Lost, John Milton - Joan Malory Webber (essay date 1980)
Joan Malory Webber (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: “The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost,” in Milton Studies, Vol. XIV, 1980, pp. 3-24.
[In the following essay, Webber claims that Milton, however awkwardly and imperfectly, breaks new ground when he raises issues concerning women's rights and importance.]
In the highly delicate investigation of the relationship between politics and poetry, epic makes an obvious, though exhausting, field of inquiry. Traditionally, epic is described as a mingling of history with myth. Whatever this formula may actually mean, its effect is always that we are pulled in two ways, between a concern for the facts of the story (where was Troy? and when?) and a response to the universality of its symbols (Troy is any dying civilization). In epic we cannot have the one without the other: if Troy does not mean something, it does not matter where it was; if we do not know its actual history, we...
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