ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of subjective human experience in Milton's epistemology as a legitimate form of knowledge straddling both mind and body. It turns to the relationship between spiritual and bodily vision', focuses on the acute self-awareness of agency and subjectivity in Milton's autobiographical accounts of himself as a blind and fallen poet, ending with a consideration of accommodation and the vision of God, the end of knowledge. The chapter demonstrates the popular mistrust of the body and the passions; Milton incorporates them into his Edenic epistemology. The linguistic element is complicated by its relation to scripture in the proliferation of biblical quotation and paraphrase throughout Milton's poetry. Milton describes reason as choice encapsulating the idea that imperfect forms of knowing passionate, sensory, incomplete are also a part of reason, for choice, like faith, can only exist under the condition of imperfect knowledge.
