‘Paradise Regained’

2021 ◽  
pp. 56-64
Author(s):  
Alastair Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Paradise Regained

This chapter focuses on John Milton’s Paradise Regained, looking at the alleged defects in its style. Several critics have spoken of a barer Miltonic style, found in Paradise Regained and in some other of his works, which contrasts with the grand style of Paradise Lost. This barer style is deliberately plain, and on principle avoids the ornate epic magniloquence of ‘swelling epithets thick-laid’. Indeed, Paradise Regained exhibits some low-style features, such as laconism. However, another approach has been to see Paradise Regained as reflecting a new personal phase in Milton’s development. The chapter then argues that the style of Paradise Regained was innovative, considering the characteristics of this new style. The style of Paradise Regained may be bare by some criteria; but it is incomparably rich in mimetic effects—richer, indeed, than most of Paradise Lost.

The Chronology of Milton's Major Poems

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 345-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Shawcross
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Paradise Regained ◽  
Important Study

The conclusion of Ants Oras as to the chronology of Milton's major poems, based on his important study of the blank vejse, is, I believe, in serious error. Examining strong pauses, both terminal and medial, the distribution of medial pauses over the pentameter line, run-on lines, feminine and masculine pauses, the distribution of polysyllables over the verse line, feminine endings, rhythmical expressions creating shifted stresses, syllabized “-ed” endings, and pyrrhic verse endings, Oras concludes that the traditional chronology for Paradise Lost (from Book I through Book XII), Paradise Regained (from Book I through Book IV), and Samson Agonistes is correct. As a prosodical study, the statistical data presented lead us to a greater understanding of the aforementioned verse techniques as used by Milton than we have heretofore known. Professor Oras' inferences of dated practice are, however, another matter.

'The Excursion' and Wordsworth's Iconography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Yen
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
The Other ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Paradise Regained ◽  
The One

This book considers William Wordsworth’s use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion (1814). Through this iconographical approach, it steers a middle course between The Excursion’s two very different interpretative traditions, the one focusing upon the poem’s abstraction, the other upon its touristic realism. The author explores Wordsworth’s iconography in The Excursion by tracing cultural and political allusions and correspondences in an abundance of post-1789 and earlier verbal and pictorial sources, as well as in Wordsworth’s own prose and poetry, especially The Prelude. Particular attention is paid to the complex ways in which The Excursion’s iconographical images contribute to – and also impose limitations upon – the overarching preoccupations of Wordsworth’s writings: the themes of paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context. This study thus revises New Historicist accounts of Wordsworth’s evasion of history by investigating the capacity of apparently ‘collateral’ images to respond to weighty arguments. In elucidating this vital aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic method, it reveals the visual etymologies – together with the nuances and rhetorical capacities – of five categories of images: envisioning, rooting, dwelling, flowing, and reflecting.

Choosing a captain back for Egypt: Milton and the Restoration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Chernaik
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Paradise Regained ◽  
The One

Milton as a republican viewed the restoration of kingship in 1660 with dread. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, like the last two books of Paradise Lost, have a specific Restoration historical context, at a time of persecution of former commonwealthsmen and religious Dissenters. In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s protagonist struggles against despair, the feeling that he has been abandoned by God, while recognizing his own responsibility for the humiliating slavery into which he has been plunged. Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, published in a single volume in 1671, in their different ways both concern themselves with the problems and temptations facing those who seek to serve God in a hostile, unjust society. The two works explore alternative paths for ‘the spirits of just men long opprest’: in the one case, patience, suffering, bearing ‘tribulations, injuries, insults’ courageously, not expecting redress, and in the other, violent resistance, the slaughter of one’s enemies, in an ending of Milton’s tragedy which has often puzzled and disturbed readers.

Milton

2019 ◽  
pp. 281-334
Author(s):  
Colin Burrow
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Paradise Regained ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Educational Thinking ◽  
The Way

This chapter considers the role played by imitatio in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. It shows how the traditional opposition between a ‘living’ imitation of a past text and a mere simulacral resemblance of it shapes the way Milton represents the imitated world of hell. It goes on to contextualize Milton’s understanding of imitatio. Milton was influenced by changing ways of presenting localized allusions or ‘imitations’ in editions of classical texts, by the educational thinking of the circle around Samuel Hartlib, and by the ways in which his friend Francis Junius interpreted Quintilian’s Institutio. Paradise Lost was composed in a period during which the word ‘imitation’ came to be used in new ways. It could be applied to translations which adapted classical texts to the manners of the present, and also to pastiches in the vernacular of another author’s style. Milton both resisted and responded to these developments. The chapter then shows how Milton was among the earliest writers to treat classical texts as (in a rather literal sense) ‘models’, which provide not words or images for a later writer but scalar templates for future works. The history of that word is explored, as is Milton’s use of the dizzying effects of scale which follow from an imitator regarding the texts which he imitates as ‘models’ in this sense. The chapter concludes with a discussion of such scalar effects in relation to the representations of both Rome and the Temple at Jerusalem in Paradise Regained.

The Father's Word/Satan's Wrath

PMLA ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 100 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Nyquist
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Paradise Regained

Milton's two epic beginnings are interrelated by a network of structural parallels and verbal echoes and by the articulation of the Father's Word with Satan's wrath. An important if unacknowledged intertext for Satan's temptations against the Word, which occur in both epics, is the Reformed reading of the Genesis exchange between the serpent and Eve. Granting it status as an intertext permits a fresh exploration of the intertextual relations of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Under a poststructuralist and Lacanian analysis, the distinctive logocentric structures and operations at work in these two epics reveal the authority and self-presence of the Father's Word systematically yet progressively being caught up in or displaced by Satan's plotting, by history, and by writing.

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