ABSTRACT
The Keatsian ideal of becoming a “fledged” poet who can “fly through air and space without fear” is founded on the poetic flights of John Milton in Paradise Lost. To avoid the disastrous-catastrophic potential of this isolation, the poet must intensify his dependence on the Muse. The story of the poetic principle in the epic follows the rough-edged pathway left open in the doctrinal smoothness for inspiration to find. The Muse speaks in the gaps left between the smooth rationalizations of the selfhood. Milton’s own definition of poetry, in fact, was language that is “simple, sensuous and passionate”. Milton never did forgive Eve for draining his serpent of its doctrinal stasis and in a sense stealing the ground from Adam, giving him “second thoughts” about the implications of his entire epic, which he could only see as weakness, “overcome by female charm”.
