Sin and Death in John Miltons Paradise Lost Essay

Sin and Death in Paradise Lost Abstract: Death assumes in his original argument, with most readers of Paradise Lost, that Satan is all bad, having rejected God, and presumably that his charisma is illusory. Sin assumes, with Empson, that Satans entire career, including his corruption of Eve, is the project of an all-powerful and sinister God. By the time Satan gets to Mt. Niphates in Book IV he is convinced of both; he recognizes that his misery is his own fault for rejecting God, but he knows that God is still in control of him and of his miseries even though he has brought them on himself. Essay begins below. In Jamaica Kincaids novel Lucy, the narrator remembers, as a teenager, discovering†¦show more content†¦Lucy has much to say about English poetry; she hates Wordsworth, for example, and her hatred of Wordsworth causes her to hate daffodils. But as with I wandered Lonely as a Cloud, in which ones reading of the poem inevitably depends on whether one lives in a climate that supports daffodils, Lucy recognizes that a reading of Paradise Lost begins with ones prior assumptions about it, and that those assumptions are going to be very different for a little girl in the Caribbean then for, say, F.R. Leavis. For Lucy, I believe, bad poetry is poetry that is specifically English and good poetry is poetry that is universal: universality, in other words, is a rejection of English nationality (translated in Lucy into a smug fondness for daffodils). This matters because Lucy reads Milton as rebellious before even considering Satan. Her hypothesis that the children of gods are devils is not about Miltons Satan, but about Miltons God. If the children of gods are inevitably devils, then the world is basically set up to fall. This is William Empsons argument in Miltons God, a book that has often been assumed to be about Satan despite i ts very clear title. Neither Lucy nor Empson says that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost; what they are both saying is that for a reader with or without rebellious instincts, Satans point of view,Show MoreRelated Essay on John Milton’s Paradise Lost - Defense for the Allegory of Sin and Death1574 Words   |  7 PagesDefense for the Allegory of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost Milton claims his epic poem Paradise Lost exceeds the work of his accomplished predecessors. He argues that he tackles the most difficult task of recounting the history of not just one hero, but the entire human race. However, he does not appear to follow the conventional rules of an epic when he introduces an allegory into Paradise Lost through his portrayal of Sin and Death in Book II. 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