Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise LostThis study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects' understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves. The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam's sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of Paradise Lost create between Adam and Eve, the poet and the reader; all of whom are struggling to make sense of the same problematically described places. To a surprisingly large extent, the description of prelapsarian Eden and the events that go on within it have in common a failed attempt to understand the nature of the surroundings. In observing the centrality and difficultly of this poetic discourse of place, the problem of place is found at the very heart of the Fall. |
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... Georgics for Spenser's complex analogy between agrarian and poetic labor . This reading demonstrates the possibility for a kind of Renaissance poetry that imitates one Vergilian form while refer- ring thematically to another . Thus ...
... Georgic's retelling of the Orpheus myth , a pas- sage particularly influential in the Renaissance . Within the period , as Charles Segal says of Georgics 4 itself , " the interplay between man's control over nature and nature's ...
... Georgics that the day rises or falls for any reason other than that it does , Milton can allude to this passage and replace its sympathies with true per- sonification : Thee Shepherd , thee the Woods , and desert Caves , With wild Thyme ...