ABSTRACT
The garden of Paradise Lost is drawn from the baroque sensibilities of Epicureanism. The garden space at the center of Milton’s poem also exhibits influences from the cultural and social spaces of the perspective merchant craft manual. The indebtedness to perspective craft in the poem is found in the preponderance of inlaid and artificial vistas, but also in the ways in which Eden’s horizons are constructed as perspective frames. Strikingly, the overall topos of the garden offers a poetic reproduction of Robert Pricke’s “Diversity of Horizons” image.1 Just as Pricke’s image foregrounds two perspectives-divine and human —so too Milton introduces us to Eden by juxtaposing the sightlines of Satan and Uriel. Uriel’s angelic perspective is described as an “eye that pursu’d [Satan] down” as the fallen angel enters the perspective plane of the garden.2 The geometrical ordering of Eden (and elsewhere) in the poem should not be too quickly subsumed under poetical experimentation with visual and temporal veridicality.3
