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“Plain” and “Ornate” Styles and The Structure of Paradise Lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Peter Berek
Peter Berek*
Affiliation:
Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.
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Extract

Milton uses the contrast between “plain” or “unpoetic” speech and “ornate” or “obviously poetic” speech as an important resource for presenting to the reader of Paradise Lost the difference between perfection and imper fection, innocence and corruption. The poem associates rhetoric, oratory, and most ornamental verbal contrivances with Satan and the fallen angels, and the contrast between their style and the bare and unemotional dialogue in Heaven is intended to make the reader suspect the arts of language as devices for concealing or manipulating the truth instead of stating or revealing it. The speeches of the unfallen Adam and Eve treat words as a set of counters for the truths of the created universe, but after the fall they, like the fallen angels, use language in ways which imply that its correspondence to the “truths” of the universe is a matter for speculation. When Adam and Eve are reconciled with each other and to God, their speeches contain striking reminders of the style of the Son in Book in. Of course, all the effects of Paradise Lost, both plain and ornate, are artful, but the criticism of reliance on persuasive and immediately appealing styles implied by the structure of the poem may help to explain Milton's deliberate forgoing of such effects in Books xi and xii and in Paradise Regain'd.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , March 1970 , pp. 237 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

1 Milton's God (London, 1961).

2 Minneapolis, Minn., 1953, p. 128.

3 “The Dialogue in Heaven: A Reconsideration of Paradise Lost, iii.1–417,” ? M LA, LXXII (Sept. 1957), 603.

4 MP, LVI (May 1959), 224–242. Broadbent also uses rhetorical analysis in passing in Chs. iii, iv, and vii of Some Graver Subject: An Essay on Paradise Lost (New York, 1960).

5 “Pandaemonium and Deliberative Oratory,” Neophilologus, XLII (1964), 159–176; “‘Magnifie Titles’: Satan's Rhetoric and the Argument of Nobility,” MLR, LXI (Oct. 1966), 561–571; “Ethos and Dianoia: Character and Rhetoric in Paradise Lost,” Language and Style in Milton, ed. R. D. Emma and J. T. Shawcross (New York, 1968), pp. 193–232.

6 The Metaphoric Structure of Paradise Lost (Baltimore, Md., 1962).

7 “Milton's View of Rhetoric,” SP, LXIV (Oct. 1967), 685–711.

8 ix.670–672. All quotations from Milton's poetry are taken from Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957). Future references to book and line number will appear in the text.

9 “A Note on the Verse of John Milton,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, xxi (1936), 32–40.

10 Institutio Oratorio, ed. H. E. Butler (London and New York, 1921), ii, 28–29 (Ch. xvii).

11 Broadbent, “Milton's Rhetoric,” pp. 224–242; Cope, The Metaphoric Structure of Paradise Lost, p. 170.

12 Joseph H. Summers discusses these patterns in The Muses Method: An Introduction to Paradise Lost (London,1962).

13 Milton's Paradise Lost (London, 1732), note to x.731.