SOURCE: “The Descent to Light,” in The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton's Poetry, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, pp. 122-42.
In the following essay, which was originally published in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology in 1961, Allen suggests that Paradise Lost should be thought of as an allegory about allegory and sees the movement in the epic as similar to that in the myths of Orpheus and Hercules, as the characters descend into darkness before ascending to light.
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