Abstract
This dissertation argues that in our experience of reading Milton’s poetry, we are confronted with two seemingly opposed ideas: the world is undeniably fallen, and human beings are capable of achieving nearly anything in it. This opposition of fallenness and affirmation manifests in Milton’s art, at crucial moments, as the idealization of the necessarily imperfect, namely the human. Following the example of Northrop Frye, the dissertation examines Milton’s poetry and aesthetics in conjunction with his humanist and political concerns. The first chapter of the dissertation examines a series of moments of excessive and potentially dangerous “idealization” in Milton’s poetry, moments in which Milton tempts his greatest enemy, idolatry, for the purpose of aesthetic and humanistic achievement. The second chapter begins by charting Milton’s debt to Edmund Spenser through an examination of the significance of the genres of romance and epic for both poets, and continues as a mythopoeic interpretation of Milton’s use of the Prosperina/Ceres myth and the Orpheus myth as a way of examining his own poetic vocation. The third chapter imposes a Miltonic reading on Shelley’s final poem, The Triumph of Life.