Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Helen Gardner

Critical Essay by Helen Gardner

SOURCE: “Milton's “Satan” and the Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan Tragedy,” in Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by Arthur E. Barker, Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 205-17.

In the following essay, originally published in English Studies in 1948, Gardner considers the character of Satan, responding to other critics' assessments of him and determining 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.”

We are all familiar with the progeny of Milton's Satan and the effort of most recent criticism has been directed towards clearing the Satan of Milton's poem from his associations with the Promethean rebel of romantic tradition. But the question whether Satan had any ancestors has hardly been raised, or has been dismissed by reference to the devil of popular tradition, or by an allusion to...
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