Epic Characteristics of Miltons Paradise Lost :: Epics Milton Paradise Lost Essays

Paradise Lost is one of the finest examples of the large tradition in all of literature. In composing this extraordinary work, John Milton was, for the most part, following in the manner of epic poets of past centuries Barbara Lewalski notes that Paradise Lost is an epic whose closest structural affinities are to Virgils Aeneid . . . she continues, however, to state that we now recognize as well the tempt of epic traditions and the presence of epic features other than Virgilian. Among the poems Homeric elements are its Iliadic subject, the death and woe resulting from an act of disobedience the portrayal of Satan as an Archillean hero actuate by a sense of injured merit and also as an Odyssean hero of wiles and craft the description of Satans perilous Odyssey to find a new motherland and the battle scenes in heaven. . . . The poem also incorporates a Hesiodic gigantomachy numerous Ovidian metamorphoses an Ariostan Paradise of Fools and Spenserian allegorical figures (Sin and Death) . . . . (3)There were changes, however, as John M. Steadman makes clear The regularity with which Milton frequently conforms to principles of epic structure make his occasional (solely nevertheless fundamental) variations on the epic tradition all the more striking by contrast. The most important departures from epic decorum--the rejection of a martial theme, and the choice of an argument that emphasizes the heros transgression and defeat instead of celebrating his virtues and triumphs--are paradoxically conditioned by concern for the ethical and religious decorum of the epic genre. On the whole, Milton has retained the formal motifs and devices of the heroic poem but has invested them with Christian matter and meaning. In this sense his epic is . . . something of a pseudomorph--retaining the form of classical epic but replacing its values and contents with Judeo-Christian correlatives. (Epic and Tragic Structure . . . 20) Steadman goes on to defend Miltons changes i n the form of the epic, saying that such revaluations are not strange in the epic tradition they were in fact inevitable (20). It is important, before continuing with an examination of Paradise Lost and its epic characteristics and conventions (specifically, those in Book I), to revaluation for a moment exactly what an epic is. Again, according to Lewalski, Renaissance critics generally thought of epics as long poems treating heroic actions or other weighty matters in a high style, thereby evoking awe or wonder (12).