Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise LostThis study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects' understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves. The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam's sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of Paradise Lost create between Adam and Eve, the poet and the reader; all of whom are struggling to make sense of the same problematically described places. To a surprisingly large extent, the description of prelapsarian Eden and the events that go on within it have in common a failed attempt to understand the nature of the surroundings. In observing the centrality and difficultly of this poetic discourse of place, the problem of place is found at the very heart of the Fall. |
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... divine decision - making . The song indicates and celebrates the angelic understanding of the unity of the divine project , which depends on the angels ' access to the whole ; its instantaneousness , its ability to present itself at ...
... divine nor not divine " Nature " ( 25 ) . However , though his doubts bother Adam , it is also clear to him and to Raphael that he is very good at expressing them . What bothers Adam in particular is proportion : the heavenly bodies ...
... divine con- straint . " 17 Rogers points out that this individualism through naturalism is eventually challenged by Michael's " relentless delineation of an authoritarian philosophy of organization that nearly overwhelms the poem's ...