John Milton Essays

12th Grade

Paradise Lost

Throughout book 9 of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, Satan is generally presented as the personification of evil, largely fuelled by Milton’s own religious grounding. This pure evil is conveyed by Milton though Satan’s innate drive to destroy mankind...

Paradise Lost

Humanism had a profound impact on European society during the Renaissance. This movement transformed the thinking processes of many Europeans, altering the way these people viewed themselves, their lives, and their place in the world. Literature...

Paradise Lost

In Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, God's only two commandments to his newest creations, the humans Adam and Eve, contradict each other. This is because God incorporates the contradictory notions of both faith and reason into the law by which he...

Paradise Lost

"...[F]rom what state

I fell, how glorious once above [the Sun's] sphere;

Till pride and worse ambition threw me down

Warring in Heav'n against Heav'n's matchless King:

Ah wherefore! He deserved no such return

From me, whom he created what I was

In that...

Paradise Lost

In Paradise Lost, Milton plays with the preconceived notions of his readers by presenting perspectives perhaps never before imagined. God is not strictly the protagonist and Satan is not strictly the antagonist, on the contrary Satan is presented...

Paradise Lost

The world of Milton's Paradise Lost is a world of discourse, full of divine as well as human speech. When God creates Christ, he calls him "thou my Word, begotten son, by thee/ This I perform" (VII. 165-6). Indeed, the concept of the "Word" (Greek...

Paradise Lost

John Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic that has influenced the Christian perception of God, Satan, sin, and the origin of mankind for centuries. His poetic account of the creation story, though, clearly expands on several aspects within the most...

Paradise Lost

Satan's account

I

169: But see the angry victor hath recalled

170: His ministers of vengeance and pursuit

171: Back to the gates of heaven: the sulphurous hail

172: Shot after us in storm, o'erblown hath laid

173: The fiery surge, that from the...

Paradise Lost

In Metaphysics, Aristotle creates a series of dualities which are intrinsically "male" or "female." Included in this original set of oppositions are light and darkness and good and evil - the former of each duo being inherently associated with the...

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost explores the natural aspiration to stand alone and to be distinguished from the multitudes. Adam, Eve, Satan, even God himself strain to assert their superiority and godliness by attempting to wield the most visible proof of godly...

Paradise Lost

"Paradise has been lost." Frank Henenlotter's 1990 film, a campy retooling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by the name of Frankenhooker (Wolf 344), tells the tale of a mad scientist who, in order to bring his wife back to life, decapitates,...

Paradise Lost

Although God asserts otherwise in Milton's work "Paradise Lost", it seems certain that it was God's will, and not the cunning endeavors of Satan, that provided for the inevitable fall of man. Aware that Satan was the physical manifestation of...