Paradise Lost: Hell and Colonialism Andrea Ramos College

John Milton wrote Paradise Lost following the epic tradition while, at the same time, it articulates concerns relevant for the Seventeenth Century audience, including the idea of exploration. With this, Milton’s epic enunciates the colonial ideology of his time. In Paradise Lost, the representation of Satan as a colonizer addresses the prominent interest in geography during Milton’s time and offers a reinterpretation on the values of colonizers in the Seventeenth Century. By making Satan the protagonist of Paradise Lost, John Milton opens up the discussion for a redefinition of heroism. Therefore, a colonial discourse is made in order to observe colonialism from a different perspective.

Paradise Lost follows the epic tradition: it has a hero, heroic couplets, beginning in medias res, and allusion to Greek mythology. But, Milton’s Paradise Lost, more than being an attempt to emulate the epic tradition, is a poem that reinvents the classical tradition in order to write “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (1.16), with the purpose of convincing the Seventeenth Century audience of the existence of a New World, Hell, and redefining the character of the explorers. For example, Milton follows the epic tradition by invoking a “...