Criticism > Poetry > Paradise Lost, John Milton - Michael Wilding (essay date 1995)

Paradise Lost, John Milton - Michael Wilding (essay date 1995)

Michael Wilding (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: “Thir Sex Not Equal Seem'd’: Equality in Paradise Lost,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, edited by P. G. Stanwood, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995, pp. 172-85.

[In the following essay, Wilding argues that in Paradise Lost Milton is less concerned with the issue of sexual equality than with the revolutionary aim of achieving total human equality, “of restoring us to that still unregained blissful seat.”]

The first description of Adam and Eve is a crucial passage for our understanding of Paradise Lost:

… but wide remote
From this Assyrian Garden, where
the Fiend
Saw undelighted all delight, all kind
Of living Creatures new to sight and strange:
Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native Honor clad
In naked Majesty seem'd Lords of all,
And worthy seem'd, for in their looks Divine...

[The entire page is 5732 words long]

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