Milton's "Eco-Eden": Place and notions of the "Green" in Pradise Lost

Notes

1 In addition to signifying readers of written stories, the term "reader" here refers to listeners of oral tradition stories, viewers of cinematic or staged stories-- basically any responder to any story.

2 "Green" here and in similar contexts refers broadly to any marked appreciation for nature's beauty and inherent worth, any pronounced sensitivity towards the non-human environment, and/or any profound understanding of ecology and nature's systems.

3 Incidentally, the multiple-sense texturing created in the epic may owe itself in part to Milton's blindness at the time of composition, an affliction that, as Theodore Banks suggests, forced Milton to rely on his non-visual senses to create scenes and evoke image and emotion (Banks 1969, 137).

Works Cited

Banks, Theodore Howard. 1969. Milton's Imagery. NewYork: AMS Press.

Bate, Jonathan. 1991. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge.

-. 1998. "Poetry and Biodiversity." In Writing the Environment, ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells. NewYork: Zed Books.

Blunden, Edmund. 1929. Nature in English Literature. NewYork: Kennikat Press. Campbell, SueEllen. 1998. "Magpie." In Writing the Environment, ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells. NewYork: Zed Books.

Flannagan, Roy, ed. 1998. The Riverside Milton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Goodman, Ellen. 1992. "Human Mastership of Nature: Aquinas and Milton's Paradise Lost." Milton Quarterly 26.1 (March): 9-15.

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. 1984. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Knott, John R. 1971. Milton's Pastoral Vision: An Approach to Paradise Lost. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Marx, Leo. 1988. The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Milton, John. 1998a. A Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634). In The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

-.1998b. Of Education (1644). In The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

-.1998c. Paradise Lost (1674). In The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Reward, Stella. 1986. "Vergil's Georgics and Paradise Lost: Nature and Human Nature in a Landscape." In Vergil at 2000: Commemorative Essays on the Poet and His Influence. NewYork: AMS Press.

Scheese, Don.1996. Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. NewYork:Twayne. Tayler, Edward William. 1964. Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

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