ABSTRACT
Epic was at the apex of all renaissance genres, the most prestigious because most comprehensive and ambitious, though Paradise Lost also draws on Shakespearian tragedy as well as consciously wanting to out-do his predecessor in English epic, Spenser’s pastoral-nationalist Fairy Queen. What the poem’s detractors unwittingly point to is that Paradise Lost, like Frankenstein, is a conflicted text – and therefore a contested text. The claim that the language of the poem is mechanical, artificial, remote and dead was effectively answered by Christopher Ricks in his book Milton’s Grand Style which explored the poem’s language as subtle, complex, sensuous and musical, and richly aware of the need to try to return language to a state of rootedness. The larger purpose was also to displace or dislodge the poem from its place on the English school curriculum and in that respect they were successful, though John Milton’s perceived ‘difficulty’ had its role to play in that.
