Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's IronyWhy do we hate Milton's God? Victoria Silver reengages with a perennial problem in Milton studies, one whose genealogy dates back at least to the Romantics, but which finds its most cogent modern expression in William Empson's revulsion at Milton's God and Stanley Fish's defense. |
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... justification, many Miltonists do not regard the poet's expressions as deliberately, designedly ironic—conflicted, contradictory, dubious perhaps, but not ironical—a view which threatens to leave my very topic in the lurch. By contrast ...
... justification, which revises rather than confirms our habitual notion of things. Yet it is hardly an innovation in European literature: tragic irony first exposed the abyss between the human and the absolute, inciting in its audience a ...
... justification, affecting every aspect of the story he tells. The fifth chapter is devoted to Satan's tragedy, and the cataclysm accompanying his shocked recognition of Milton's God, which precipitates the fatal cycle of antipathy and ...
... justification, which we generally take to mean a positive assertion of truth—God's ways being truth, as Milton reminds us. Understandably, then, critics both friendly and hostile to what his speaker relates about the loss of Eden and ...
... justifies or refutes what they say. I want only to ensure that the difficulty their ideas or language poses does not ... justification. Of course, such self-consciousness is irony's art; and in Paradise Lost it compels us to consider not ...