ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book argues that the Parliament of Heaven in Paradise Lost needs to be read on two levels: as a public expression of faith, and as a private expression of concern about his own spiritual status. The history of encounter in the poems examined in the book displays a movement from the articulation of the presence and actuality of encounter to the articulation of the potentiality or loss of encounter. The book thus chronicles the movement of serious public, religious poetry away from encounter with God – a movement from certainty to alienation, a movement in which religious poetry itself, written in fallen language, seeking to express the inexpressible, and asking the questions that arise from a time-bound consciousness of sin and distance from God, is, as it were, cast out of Eden.
