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Milton's Use of Classical Mythology in Paradise Lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Jonathan H. Collett
Jonathan H. Collett*
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.
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Abstract

There are three categories of myth in Paradise Lost, each of which is essential to the epic's proleptic structure: first, those myths identifying the pagan gods with the fallen angels; second, those myths used in comparisons with Eden, Adam, and Eve; finally, in Book xi, those myths that are types of the Old and New Testament revelation that Adam will receive. The first and third categories are evidences of God working in history, and these myths are consequently “fabled”, set in story form by the pagans; the second group have no historical reality and are only “feigned”, or fabricated. Milton uses these two words carefully. From another perspective, the first and second uses lead from the timelessness of prelapsarian existence to history. The third moves in reverse, from history to eternity, not of the world before the Fall but of the Christian glory to come.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 1 , January 1970 , pp. 88 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

1 Cornus, ll. 514–515. Citations from Milton in my text are to The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson, et al., 18 vols. (New York, 1931–38).

2 James Whaler diagrams some of these “homologous similes” in “The Miltonic Simile,” PMLA, 'XLVI“ (1931), 1034–74.

3 Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford, 1963), p. 105.

4 Jackson I. Cope, The Metaphoric Structure of Paradise Lost (Baltimore, Md., 1962), p. 136, takes the interpretation of this passage further, implying that “noon to dewy Eve” is a “promise of a later fall and its victim.”

5 'i“.50 and 'vi”.871. Rev. Henry John Todd, ed., The Poetical Works of John Milton, 6 vols. (London, 1801), 'ii“, 500, supports the eighteenth-century editor Newton's identification of the source as Hesiod. Citations from early editions of Milton in the following pages are all from this variorum edition by Todd.

6 Davis P. Harding gives all the historical evidence for a Typhon-Satan link in Milton and the Renaissance Ovid, Illinois Stud, in Lang, and Lit., xxx, No. 4 (Urbana, 1946), 85–88. It is possible that the Typhon in the Nativity Ode is the Egyptian Typhon whose dismemberment of Osiris Milton describes in Areopagitica. But the serpentine features would suggest that the Typhon in the Ode is, instead, the one in Paradise Lost.

7 The first rank of devils, however, does not diminish: Beelzebub has “Atlantean shoulders” in 'ii“.306.

8 Isabel Gamble MacCaffrey, Paradise Lost as “Myth” (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 123–124.

9 In Todd, 'iii“, 287.

10 See William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), p. 175.

11 P. 176.

12 See 'iii“.446–449, for plays on ”vain.“

13 Credit to Edward W. Tayler of Columbia Univ. for this and other echoes.

14 Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York, 1963), p. 292.

15 Bush, for example, says that the Mulciber passage is “prefaced and concluded with expressions of hostile disbelief” (p. 287).

16 'ii“.627–628 is not an exception; it describes monsters in Hell, not the devils themselves.

17 One other instance of the fiction of a myth being explicitly pointed out, this time one not applied to Eden, is in Milton's invocation to the muse Urania, who he hopes will serve him better than the classical muse Calliope served her son, Orpheus: “For thou are Heav'nlie, shee an empty dreame” ('vii“.39).

18 The Defence of Poésie, in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 'iii“ (Cambridge, Eng., 1923), 17.

19 Whaler, “The Miltonic Simile,” p. 1034.

20 P. 1051. Whaler gives its source as the Iliad ‘xiv“.346–351, and he cites Milton's direct reference to Juno's borrowing the girdle of Venus in Paradise Regained ‘ii”.214–215.

21 Charles G. Osgood, The Classical Mythology of Milton's English Poems, Yale Stud, in English, 'viii“ (New Haven, 1900), 49, gives the usual interpretation of the innocent mingling of two spheres in nature.

22 P. 1054.

23 See Ricks, Milton's Grand Style, pp. 125–126. Empson's solution to the problem, raised by Bentley, of how Ceres could ever go past her prime, since the goddesses never age, is that she will “decay when Christianity comes” (p. 185).

24 In Todd, 'iii“, 165.

25 Empson, p. 176, claims this passage “goes so far as to suggest that it was she who tempted Satan and turned him into a serpent.” But he does not see that Milton carefully says that the snake comes uncalled.

26 Patrick Hume, in the first scholarly edition of Milton (1695), gives a full account of all these serpents and their traditional interpretations (in Todd, 'iii“, 280).

27 Cf. Empson's discussion and justification of the lines, pp. 179–180.

28 Michael explains twice in Bk. xn that God works through types: ll. 230–235, 300–306. Harding, Millon and the Renaissance Ovid, pp. 80–84, shows how Milton relies more on Ovid than on Genesis in describing the flood.

29 J. W. Mackail, Springs of Helicon (New York, 1909), p. 177, calls the passage “exquisitely beautiful; but it is on the point of becoming ornament for ornament's sake: it trembles on the verge of classicism.” Bentley cuts out all the myth from the passage (in Todd, 'iii“, 344–345). Whaler, p. 1054, cannot make his details line up homologously.

30 Allan H. Gilbert, ‘“A Double Janus’ (Paradise Lost ‘xi”.129),“ PMLA, ‘liv” (1939), 1029.

31 In Todd, 'ii“, 489–490.

32 Todd, 'iii“, 345.

33 Don Cameron Allen, “Milton and the Descent to Light,” JEGP, ‘lx“ (1961), 620–621, explains the Hercules-Antaeus type, as does Northrop Frye in ”The Typology of Paradise Regained,“ MP, ‘liii” (1956), 232–238.

34 Cope, Metaphoric Structure, p. 143.