The point of view I have insisted on is that Milton conceives a poet
to be one who employs his imagination to make a revelation of truth,
truth which the poet himself entirely believes. One objection to
this point of view will at once occur to the reader, the habitual
employment in both poems of the fictions of pagan mythology. This is
an objection as old as Miltonic criticism. The objection came from
those readers who had no difficulty in realising the biblical scenes,
or in accepting demoniac agency, but who found their imagination
repelled by the introduction of the gods of Greece or Rome. It is not
that the biblical heaven and the Greek Olympus are incongruous, but
it is that the unreal is blended with the real, in a way to destroy
credibility.
To this objection the answer has been supplied by De Quincey. To
Milton the personages of the heathen Pantheon were not merely familiar
fictions or established poetical properties; they were evil spirits.
That they were so was the creed of the early interpreters. In their
demonology, the Hebrew and the Greek poets had a common ground. Up to
the advent of Christ, the fallen angels had been permitted to delude
mankind.
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