ABSTRACT

The challenge that Francis Bacon had set down was that poetry dealt only with a world of shadows, the imaginative kinsmen of superstitions. That is a challenge which John Donne accepts. The mind had become self-conscious in Donne's poetry, separated from wisdom, and the poet himself had lost that conception of his relationship to society, and a purpose to fulfil. John Milton's great invention is his creation of a style suitable for a cosmic and heroic poem, the greatest poem in English which has an action and characters, and conversations, and which through its imagery touches upon life illimitably. Whatever may have been Milton's intentions, he fashioned out in Satan a figure of rebellion at which later romanticists were to rejoice. The influence of the Miltonic Satan was one which the poet could certainly not have anticipated. Lara and the Giaour are formed ultimately on the model of Milton's Satan, and so, in part, is the poet who made them.