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.”
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