Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on June 19, 2008
Literary Imagination 2008 10(3):274-291; doi:10.1093/litimag/imn026
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The Begetting of the Son: Curiosity, Politics, and Trial in Paradise Lost
*E-mail: dmikics@gmail.com.
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Readers have often emphasized Milton's power to center his epic subject. In Paradise Lost, all history comes down to a few crucial moments: temptation, trial, creation, fall, and redemption. But, from Dr. Johnson on, Milton's unrivalled digressive capabilities have been noticed too. Angus Fletcher remarks that for Milton " ‘the spectacles of books’ are a means of sublimity, since at every point the reader is led from one scene to an allusive second scene, to a third, and so on."1 (In one extravagant simile, for example, we move from Satan to the Titans to Leviathan "haply slumb’ring on the Norway foam."2) Paradise Lost is both centripetal and centrifugal: it narrows itself down to the root of "all our woe" (1.3) even as it takes encyclopedic flight into unaccustomed realms of Miltonic knowledge.
Milton's digressive inclination draws us in, alluring us with wandering mazes, and gives us a seductive