ENGL 316 Lecture Notes - Areopagitica, Killing Machine, Odysseus
5 Dec 2012
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Document Summary
Clearly drawn to the story of king arthur. Trying to decide what kind of poetic genre would be most appropriate to him. Milton was interested in the idea of writing a tragedy. Milton thought about making his great work a drama, a medieval morality play. Johnson says that paradise lost is unrelateable-to, meaning that the reader has little natural sympathy. By writing an epic, he makes the archetypal characters more like human beings. He"s dealing with how writers write about things that are beyond human experience. This is equally a religious poem, relatable to one of the fundamental problems of christianity. The model of christ"s incarnation is very much like what writers do when they try to embody abstract concepts into forms that we can recognize. Poets use the things of our world to help us understand the things of another world. Every kind of genre is brought together into this whole.
