ENGL 2210 - Early British Literature - Essay 2: Articles and Websites

The article analyzes Satan's unconquerable will in the poem "Inferno" and Milton's use of Dantean contrapasso in "Paradise Lost." It shows the significance of punishments in Milton's poem just as they do in "Inferno." It also argues that the demons depicted in "Paradise Lost" undergo punishments that are fitting for the specific sins they commit in heaven. It sheds light on the nature of a sinner's soul and shows that punishment increases as a sinful will's power decreases.

The author considers the character of Satan, responding to other critics' assessments of him and determines that Milton developed the figure dramatically throughout the poem and expended his creative energies and his full imaginative powers in exploring the fact of perversity within a single heroic figure.

In the following essay, the author argues that Paradise Lost is a mixed-genre poem whose primary genre of epic undergoes revisionary treatment in Milton's hands and holds that the work seeks its identity between possibilities of epic and tragedy, or loss and restoration.