[简答题,10分] Analyze the main idea and artistic features of Paradise Lost.

a.Theme of Paradise Lost Paradise Lost is Milton’s masterpiece. Its story is taken from the Bible, about “the fall of man: that is, how Adam and Eve are tempted by Satan to disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and how they are punished by God and driven out of Paradise. In Milton’s words, the purpose of writing the epic is to “justify the ways of God to men”, but apparently with Satan as his mouthpiece, Milton is uttering his intense hatred of tyranny in the capacity of the revolutionary. By depicting Satan and his followers as well as their fiery utterance and brave actions, Milton is showing a Puritan’s revolt against the dictator and against the established doctrines of the Catholic and the Anglican Church. b. Artistic features: Milton is not only a revolutionary, but also a glorious pioneer to introduce blank verse into non-dramatic poetry. The chief characteristic of the poem is the long, involved and sometimes seemingly interminable sentence structure, so that a passage frequently goes on and on through ten or twenty or even more lines of verse, and the meaning of the whole thing is suspended and not completed, while clause after clause are added to enrich the complexity of thought or to increase the effect of the description, till the end of the sentence comes with the periods, and only then does the reader grasp the full significance of the utterance. The method is usually extremely effective and makes the verse sound, sometimes oratorical and sometimes elaborately logical or picturesque, and this richness of the style has frequently been called “Miltonic”.