Dottoressa

Paradise Lost Assessment 1: How effective is the depiction of the war in Heaven?

A successful depiction depends on how well described and detailed it is, especially if it is the representation of warfare. It needs to feel real and plausible as we read about it, as if we were there, fighting with the soldiers to the point where we almost can feel their pain and suffering. This is a task thatMilton has surely achieved in more than a thousand lines accounting the warfare. However, to discuss the effectiveness of Milton's depiction of the war in Heaven, we have to consider many different aspects. First of all, we should consider the amount of texts and works that dealt with the topic before Milton did and also the epic classics that Milton looked up to, to write his landmark speech.Therefore we should take into account works such as Valvasone's Angeleida, Alfano's La guerra angelica tra Michele e Lucifero and Valmarana's Daemonomachiae; we need to also look at Homer and Virgil with their Iliad and Aeneid and authors chronologically closer to Milton, such as Tasso, for example. We shall see, then, how Milton actually depicted the warfare and analyse which traits of the epicclassics he used, enhanced and which ones he changed completely to make his narration even more forceful. From this aspect, we see how he doesn't invoke a higher power as many others would have done, but simply how he relies on the experience of the angel Raphael to relate to the story. Then, the depiction of the masses of warring angels preparing themselves to fight gives us the exact image of a warabout to begin. This, combined with a representation of an adamant God showing no reaction and effectively putting himself as Satan's adversary makes this image even more suggestive. These features, along with the style and the narrative techniques Milton used, portray the great and detailed description of the war in Heaven as one of the greatest epic war accounts to have ever been written.
Miltonusually relied on the Bible a lot to write about the events of Paradise Lost. For example, some lines of the creation in Book VII, look almost identical to the ones in the Genesis. However, the war in Heaven is a whole different matter. In the Bible, there are brief references to it only in Revelations. Although the story is not told thoroughly in the Scriptures many authors have tried to relateto it, i.e Vondel who wrote Lucifer or Jacopo Peri with his La guerra angelica. There are a lot of works that we can consider to be Milton's sources for his masterpiece: Lucifer, for example, is similar in some ways because of his depiction of Satan and of the war in Heaven. similarly to Milton's Satan, Vondel's is moved by pride and envy towards mankind and the blessings they have been providedwith. Most of all there is a very famous line of Paradise Lost in which Satan states:

«Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.»

This line is very similar to a concept expressed in Vondel's Lucifer where Satan says:

«Better it were by far
To be the first Prince in a lower Court
Than second, or still less, in heaven's light.»

These lines are incredibly similar that manysuggested that Milton took inspiration from Vondel's Lucifer but the similarities could be justified by assuming that both authors had the same sources for their works.
We obviously cannot know for certain which works influenced and inspired Milton. He had been in Italy so he could have known Peri's La guerra angelica but there were not any printed texts so Milton would have seen it only by viewing themanuscript. So, instead of looking at each and every single pre-Milton author, we should consider them as a unit and analyse the analogies and differences between this collection of traditions and the war in Heaven as it is depicted in Paradise Lost.
Milton introduces the narration of the war in Book V when Raphael is sent to Adam and Eve to warn them to not disobey God. In order to do this, he...