Paradaise Lost by John Milton

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PART ONE:

John Milton is the greatest poet of all time. Oddly enough, he wanted to be as great as Homer or Virgil and be remembered like they were. Milton had this thing called Photographic Memory, so he remembered everything he had ever read. He even spends six straight years just reading every book he could get his hands on. However, he ended up becoming blind because when he did read the only lighting he had was candle light so he literally read his eyes out. Yet, this was before he could do something great, so he rounded up his daughters and he had him write down an epic poem he had written in his head. This poem his daughters penciled down for him is known as Paradise Lost, a poem about the story of Adam and Eve from the Bible. The epic poem expresses the idea of Satan being an angel who had just fallen because he and other angels started a war against God because they didn’t want to serve him, so they plan to corrupt mankind to get revenge on God and their mission is successful, but it was part of God’s plan. However, if God is apparently all powerful, and all loving, why doesn’t He help the people in need? Why is there death and sickness and if He has the ability, why doesn’t He do anything about it? Milton tries to justify God’s ways to mankind through this poem, or in other words, Milton’s theodicy as defined by Joseph Kett, “The declared aim of the poet John Milton in his poem Paradise Lost. Milton tries to explain why God allowed the Fall of Man.” (Kett, Joseph F). John Milton’s theodicy from Paradise Lost can be broken up into three key components: event’s before the fall of man, events in the Garden of Eden, and lastly what happens after the fall.
The first component of Milton’s Theodicy from Paradise Lost is the e...

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...has to give them a punishment, and what better punishment then banning them and their children out of the garden forever. Overall, this explanation works because bad things cannot go unpunished; it is just the way things are supposed to be.

Works Cited

Airey, L, Jennifer.. "Eve's Nature, Eve's Nurture in Dryden's Edenic Opera." Studies in English Literature, 1500 - 1900 3(2010):529. eLibrary. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.

Hyman, John. "THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE." Think 25(2010):9. eLibrary. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Kett, Joseph F. "justify the ways of God to men, to." The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. 2002. eLibrary. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.

Marks, Cato. "Writings of the Left Hand: William Blake Forges a New Political Aesthetic." Huntington Library Quarterly 1(2011):43. eLibrary. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.

Mitchell, Ruth.. Paradise Lost. Barron's, 2004. eLibrary. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.

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