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Paradise Lost
As Paradise Lost opens, Satan and his defeated followers awake in hell. Satan rallies his fallen angels but knows he cannot defeat God in a head-on battle. Instead, he resorts to an underhanded...
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Paradise Lost
In his speech to Eve, Satan uses every rhetorical means at his disposal to persuade her to defy God and eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. First of all, he uses ethos, an ethical...
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Paradise Lost
Without the final two books of Paradise Lost, Milton would've failed in his original goal to justify the ways of God to men. He wouldn't have been in a position to explain God's reasoning and how...
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Paradise Lost
As it turns out, Adam needs less persuading to eat the forbidden fruit than Eve. At least when Satan, disguised as a serpent, persuaded Eve to defy God he used rational arguments, whereas Eve...
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Paradise Lost
In the opening of Paradise Lost, Milton asks his muse for poetic assistance: That to the highth of this great ArgumentI may assert Eternal Providence,And justifie the wayes of God to men. Here,...
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Paradise Lost
Heaven is a place of true order, goodness, light, and holiness while hell is a place of pure evil. However, complicating this depiction is the fact that Satan builds a city called Pandemonium with...
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Paradise Lost
One of the central social issues in John Milton's period was the authority of kings. Charles I (19 November 1600–30 January 1649) had believed in the divine right of kings, and in his efforts to...
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Paradise Lost
There are literally hundreds of allusions to the Bible peppered throughout John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, particularly to Genesis. Genesis is the first book in the Christian Bible and...
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Paradise Lost
In Paradise Lost both Adam and Eve have free will. According to orthodox Christian belief, this ability to make choices freely is a gift from God given to every human being. And yet our original...
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Paradise Lost
Thank you for contributing to eNotes. Note that educators are not responsible for completing your assignment and only provide insight. In the case of an abstract, I can provide key points to guide...
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Paradise Lost
The most powerful character in Paradise Lost is clearly God. Not only is he the most powerful, but there is a sense that he is the only powerful character since he controls everything. God has no...
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Paradise Lost
Discord is the first daughter of Sin. This implies that Sin, personified as a female, has other daughters. If that is indeed the case, however, we never get to find out their identities. But we do...
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Paradise Lost
In book 9, Satan creeps into the garden in the form of a serpent and approaches Eve, who is apart from Adam. He raises himself tall in coils, the coils representing his deviousness—he will not be...
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Paradise Lost
A simile is a figure of speech that compares two different objects or ideas through linking words including “like” and “as.” Examples of similes include “She sings like an angel” and “I feel as big...
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Paradise Lost
In answering this, I would try to focus not so much on literary devices per se but on the character of Satan as Milton depicts it. Is Satan in fact a "great man (or in this case, a supernatural...
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Paradise Lost
In Paradise Lost, Eden is presented as an idyllic, harmonious land. Animals live in peace with one another. Food is bountiful. The surroundings are gorgeous. This harmony all hangs upon one factor:...
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Paradise Lost
We get a strong sense of Satan's unhappiness in the opening books of Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. So much so that he almost becomes a sympathetic character, even if this is not Milton's...
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Paradise Lost
John Milton published this famous epic poem in the seventeenth century partly as an expression of his political perspective during the reign of Charles I of England. Charles adopted the concept of...
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Paradise Lost
"Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell." In Milton's great epic poem, Paradise Lost, the opening books focus on the character of Satan, and some would argue that he's the true hero of the poem,...
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Paradise Lost
Tragic heroes experience a reversal of fortune due to fate or their own hubris (fatal flaw). Characters such as the stubborn Oedipus Rex or the indecisive Hamlet are tragic heroes in the...
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Paradise Lost
Satan in many ways follows the exact pattern of a tragic hero but I will argue that he falls short of that status, even in the first two books. A tragic hero traditionally has a tragic flaw, as...
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Paradise Lost
The first two books of Paradise Lost are largely about Satan standing up to God. I don't think it's accurate to say that he's standing up against the gods or fate, as those are Greek concepts and...
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Paradise Lost
Among the issues that John Milton raises in Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley also brings up in Frankenstein are the relationship of God—or a god-like creator—to his creations, and the position of the...
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Paradise Lost
The great English poet John Milton wrote his epic poem Paradise Lost to "justify the ways of God to man." For many readers, though, Lucifer emerged as the most compelling character. This was...
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Paradise Lost
Satan is indirectly characterized by the narrator as evil rather heroic. We learn, as he wakes chained to sea of fire in hell, that his eyes are almost immediately filled with stubborn ("obdurate")...
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Paradise Lost
Satan embodies a tragic hero in Paradise Lost because he is an otherwise good person with one fatal flaw. In Milton’s interpretation, Satan is a wise, beautiful and noble angel. But Satan is overly...
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Paradise Lost
Ethos, logos, and pathos are the three pillars of classical persuasion. Ethos is persuasion based on character or credibility. Logos is persuasion based on logic: facts and statistics. Pathos is...
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Paradise Lost
Situational irony occurs when events work out the opposite or individuals turn out to be the opposite, of what is expected. One of the ironies of Book II is that the legions of devils consider...
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Paradise Lost
Aporia is an expression of doubt or a place at which a decision must be made. As Satan addresses his legions in book 1, newly flung into hell, he conveys to them that they are at a juncture or...
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Paradise Lost
The first two books of Paradise Lost are full of stirring martial speeches, as Satan and the other fallen Angels try to rally their spirits after their defeat. However, the use of alliteration is...
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Paradise Lost
Polysyndeton is a literary technique in which conjunctions—such as "and," "but," and "or"—are used in quick succession, often with no commas, when the conjunctions could just as easily be removed....
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Paradise Lost
Assonance can be defined as the repetition of similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in the stressed syllables of adjacent words. It is largely employed as a means of...
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Paradise Lost
The epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton is concerned with the fall and eventual redemption of humankind. It tells of the expulsion of Satan and his followers from heaven and the expulsion of...
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Paradise Lost
This passage is from Book I of Paradise Lost which begins in media res as do the Greek classics after a brief proposal of Man's disobedience and the loss of the paradise of Eden, with the mention...
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Paradise Lost
"No man wished it longer." —Samuel Johnson on Paradise Lost As a dedicated and fervent Christian, Milton believes that the fall was entirely due to the sin of Adam and Eve. His famous mission...
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Paradise Lost
This question is somewhat open to interpretation. Within the text of Paradise Lost, Eve does indeed seem to be inferior to Adam. Through a modern context, this is not a very agreeable idea, but...
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Paradise Lost
A paradigm in a literary context means a typical example of something. Superman is a paradigm of superheroes; an apple is a paradigm of fruit. It is sort of the first thing that comes to mind....
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Paradise Lost
Perhaps the most important “crisis of authority” in England in the seventeenth century was the rebellion against King Charles I and his execution as part of the English Civil War. Milton was a...
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Paradise Lost
Satan in Paradise Lost can be seen as the paragon of reason for a number of reasons. First and foremost, he always seems to have a plan in mind, and that requires a great deal of rational thought....
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Paradise Lost
The speaker of the first 26 lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost is clearly meant to be identified with Milton himself. The speaker displays an intriguing combination of ambition and humility, as...
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Paradise Lost
The main theme of Paradise Lost by poet John Milton is the rejection of God’s Laws. This epic work deals with Satan’s rejection of God’s Law and Satan’s subsequent expulsion to earth where he seeks...
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Paradise Lost
In John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, the relationship between Adam and Eve changes radically after the fall in Book 9. The relationship between the first couple, as it is presented in Book 4...
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Paradise Lost
When meaning is unclear, it is important to analyze a quotation in context with the rest of the text [I've inserted the whole contextual quote above]. You must ask questions like: Who is speaking?...
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Paradise Lost
Eve tells Adam about her first exploration of the garden in Book IV of Paradise Lost, telling him that she found a clear smooth lake, which seemed to her like a second sky. She looked into the...
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Paradise Lost
The quote you're referring to is spoken by Satan in book 1 of Milton's Paradise Lost. Specifically, in lines 254–255, he states: The mind in its own place, and in itselfCan make a Heav'n of Hell,...
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Paradise Lost
Initially, after being cast down from heaven, Satan is a physically impressive specimen, in keeping with what we'd expect of a fallen angel. He is a strong, imposing character who positively exudes...
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Paradise Lost
In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Milton announces the subject of his poem and asks the Muse to sing: Of Mans First Disobedience, and the FruitOf that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal...
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Paradise Lost
In Book I of Paradise Lost Milton immediately conforms to the conventions of classical epic by invoking the muse, the traditional source of poetic inspiration in ancient times. As a scholar steeped...
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Paradise Lost
Many have noted how surprisingly "American" themes in Milton's works are. Satan choosing to set off into a new world, subjugate those living there, and rule is strongly resonant with the American...
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Paradise Lost
Book 9 of Paradise Lost is where Adam finally experiences the tragedy that has been waiting for him and Eve. Milton introduces this in the first stanza of the book, telling the reader that he will...
