John Milton: Satan’s speech

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John Milton (1608-74) was the author of the greatest epic
poem in English, Paradise Lost (1667), he was also a reformist
prose writer, a member of the revolutionary government and a
victim of censorship. the religious one, the domestic one. In
1649 he served the republican government, justifying in his
writings the execution of the king in the rest of Europe. After
the return of the monarchy in 1660, his republican writings
were condemned to the stake and the author was sent to
prison. This experience of political and personal loss was
recreated in his great poem, Paradise Lost, written after the
restoration of the monarchy.

Milton chose the epic genre for his masterpiece due to the
grandeur of its subject and followed typical epic conventions.
Paradise Lost opens with an affirmation of the epic's theme -
"Man's First Disobedience" - as all traditional epics do. This
epic takes place in the universe: in heaven, hell and Eden.
There they meet God, Satan, Christ, Man and many fallen
angels. The typical character of the epic hero has been
modified by Milton for glory to the changing spirit of the age,
who seeks on the battlefield of battle, but a more
philosophical hero who must learn to control himself before
being judged fit to find an empire. The style is tall and
complex, with Latin syntax and difficult vocabulary.

The universe of Paradise Lost

Milton was familiar with Copernican cosmology, which

established the sun as the center of the universe, basing his
universe on the more traditional Ptolemaic system. In Milton's
paradise, God sits on his throne surrounded by the nine
orders of angels; the tenth, who rebelled under Satan, was
hurled into a terrifying realm, Hell, which is below Chaos and
which is antithetical to God's world. From chaos, God created
the earth, fixed at the center of the universe. , and the spheres
around it.

Satan as an epic hero

At the beginning of the poem Satan has many of the
characteristics of the epic hero: leadership, courage that
refuses to accept defeat and the willingness to undertake the
desperate undertaking of escaping from hell and attacking
God's creation - man. Satan embodies the figure of the rebel
against authority.