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About Paradise Lost some of the things

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About Paradise Lost some of the things
About Paradise Lost some of the things to keep in mind:

1. Milton’s magnum opus comes after a long period of apprenticeship in terms of deciding on the theme, experiments with language, building the epic style and also a superstructure using the texts on the Fall that had already been in existence from its genesis in the Bible.
2. Other influences were Homer, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, medieval versions of the fall from vernaculars.
3. Influence of secondary epics by Camoes, Tasso, Ariosto.
4. Satan’s magnification and majesty are surely the effect of Milton’s reading of the epics. While he is staunchly a christian, his imaginative, intellectual and academic interests and orientation are formed by the Renaissance spirit.
5. PL is riven by conflicts of different kinds. Between Christianity and other views of the world, medieval cosmology and modern scientific temper, liberalism and conservatism, different concepts of heroism. Consequently it gains in richness in texture and meaning with its variegated structure and points of view without letting the reader come to any definite conclusion about the theme of the poem that is ‘the justification of God’s ways to Man’.
6. It’s the plenitude of responses and mindboggling number of interpretations that the work leads to that constitute the real success of the poem. Milton wants his readers to be forever in a conflict between traditional beliefs and individual interpretations. Faith should never be unquestioning and blind , it should be attained after all one’s doubts have been laid to rest.

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