A03 - PARADISE LOST

Analysed 'Paradise Lost'  in light of the rules ant heories then applicable to epic poetry such as the classicakl unities of time, place and action. Dryden said that paradise Lost "was not a true heroic poem" and "did not fit into any recognised literary category" and found that there were, "too few human characters and too many supetrnatural ones."

Drden recognised the Catholic quality to the poem saying - "The Aristotelian relief of the emotions through pity and terror." He also was the first point out that "Satan is the only possible hero of the work."

"Milton was more of a monarchist than a republican and certainly not a democrat in the modern sense of the term."

"Highly eccentric, and as scandolous to Protestants as to Catholics" 

Has seen Paradise Lost as a "complete cosmological system in which religion, ethics and polotics and psychology are intermingled"

"God is the figure of the absolute, christ represents intelligence triumphant over passion, Satan the chaotic  spontainiety of self-centred impulses"

The political message of the poem is the "necessity of freedom to enable man to discover his true self and realise his potential"