ABSTRACT
Paradise Lost sets out to define and celebrate a heroism which is opposite in almost every way to the kind of heroism that we associate naturally with ‘epic’—the heroism of daring, action, enterprise, glory, warfare, personal achievement, success in destroying enemies and establishing kingdoms, imposing oneself on the world. The activity which moves creatures through space in Paradise Lost is primarily a mental or spiritual activity, and the displacement that occurs is seen as a moral displacement at the same time as it is represented physically. Modern critics have preferred to follow Raphael rather than Addison, finding the literal level of the War in Heaven not to represent Joseph Addison’s sublime in agitation, ‘greatness in confusion’, but rather an empty fortissimo, more reminiscent of film epics than of Homeric ones. The grotesque mismatching of the planes of perception in John Milton’s handling of his fictions of Heavenly meaning is often nowadays referred to as his gift for ‘comedy’.
