The book can be broken into two movements. I wish to highlight for the gentle reader one of the funniest moments of irony in the poem: The speech of the fallen angel Belial in Book II.īook II is undoubtedly one of the great literary achievements of Milton and, in my view, probably the greatest literary achievement of Milton in the whole of Paradise Lost. The poets have always been gifted in their use of irony and how irony is often tied to allegory. Miltonian Irony and Political Allegory & Satire Instead, I want to look at some of the deeper episodes of the text which bring out Miltonian irony in addition to the other, esoteric, or deeper, readings of the text which include Paradise Lost as a work of political allegory and philosophical commentary.
While this reading also highlights the genius of Milton, as well as his infinite imagination, this reading is well-known and elaborated on, so I do not want to tread on already familiar ground.
#PARADISE LOST BOOK 2 LICENSE#
Taking biblical inspiration, Milton takes poetic and imaginative license to ‘fill in the gaps,’ so to speak, creating an awe-inspiring and wonderous depiction of what Cotton Mather called the ‘wonders of the invisible world.’ In attempting to “justify the ways of God to men,” (i.26) Milton not only does battle with Satan, his defense of the free-will of Adam and Eve is clearly a challenge-in the form of poetic theology-the supralapsarianism of the Cambridge Calvinists (William Perkins and William Ames in particular) and the emergent hyper-Calvinist wing of English non-conformist Protestantism. It is a work that imagines the War in Heaven, the fall of the angels, the rise of Satan, and the Fall of Man. In its most simplistic, or exoteric, reading, Paradise Lost is a grand poem of the Christian imagination. However, I do wish to explore, however, succinctly, the various levels to reading Milton’s epic. Milton’s poem, though written over various stages of his life, was published after the Restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England (with significant “Romish” elements to it), is a rich and dense poem that tries to do many things and contains within it several contradictions which many commentators have long seized on. John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost is remembered for two things, the famous quote from Satan after having been expelled from Heaven, “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n,” (i.263) and for creating the fiery depiction of Hell dramatically juxtaposed to the cold and frozen hell of Dante’s Inferno.
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