“Majestic Unaffected Style”: Quakerism and Improvement in Paradise Regained
Kendrick, Christopher
Early Modern Culture, No. 4 (2004)
Abstract
The general topic for consideration in this essay is the late Milton’s departure from the Grand Style, especially as this is exemplarily effected in Paradise Regained.1 It is a biographical-canonical topic — or not just a topic, but a theme, emerging from the links among the major works. The theme is established in the last two books of Paradise Lost, where the turn to typological chronicle coincides with a lowering of the stylistic register. Lexically, this means a reduction of the copious element: fewer ornamental words, less variation, less profuse redundance. Syntactically — and more importantly — it means a curtailment of periodic sweep in favor of the magisterial-propositional. The opening of Paradise Regained, measuring its terseness so determinedly against the rapt flight of the “diffuse” epic’s inductions, so soberly dividing the poet’s identity (first verse-paragraph) from the role of the muse (second verse-paragraph), announces a further lowering of stylistic level. It is a pyrotechnically middle style.
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