ABSTRACT
In Paradise Lost “love” encompasses a wide range of relationships: human love, narcissistic love, love of God, Divine love, angelic love, and satanic love. There is a durable critical tradition which regards the relation of one poet to another as being fundamentally benign and supportive, consisting in an attachment that is little short of love. There is in both an untoward emphasis on discrepancy and choice – on economics -that calls into question love’s unitive function and capacities. The correspondence of a love of God associated with, but increasingly difficult to disentangle from, fear, with a love of nature that supports an alliance with fear, is one of the more obvious indices of the reconstitution of Miltonic theocentrism as “natural religion.” Identification with the former model reverses priorities: whereas Adam reproduces God’s “superior” love towards creation, William Wordsworth reproduces the devotion of Mother Nature in his caressing adult consciousness.
