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John Milton (1608-74)

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Paradise Lost online Images of hell Milton-L discussions

Reading Paradise Lost

1	The devil is in truth the Hero of Milton's poem; his plan, which he lays, pursues, and at last executes, being the subject of the poem. -Lord Chesterfield, letter (1749)
2	I set as little by kings, lords, clergy, critics, etc. as all these respectable Gentry do by my Bardship. I am resolved to study the sentiments of a very respectable personage, Milton's Satan ­ 'Hail horrors! Hail, infernal world!' - Robert Burns, letter (1787)
3	Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah. Note: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. - William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)
4	My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception, than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter days: poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted." -Samuel Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1815)
5	Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy. - Shelley, "Defence" (1821)
6	... it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve-are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. - Coleridge, Table Talk (1833)
7	Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets; not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things within its own sphere; not multiform: repulsion was the law of his intellect-he moved in solitary grandeur. - Thomas DeQuincey, "Oxford" (1835)
8	Milton had as much as what is meant by gusto as any poet. He forms the most intense conception of things, and then embodies them by a single stroke of his pen. Force of style is perhaps his first excellence. - William Hazlitt, "On Milton's Versification"
9	I am struck by the extreme difference between this poem and any other. It lies, I think, in the sublime aloofness and impersonality of the emotion. He deals in horror and immensity and squalor and sublimity but never in the passions of the human heart. Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one's own joy and sorrows? - Virginia Woolf, Diary (1918)