But two critics have written about it particularly well, arguing in different ways for the breadth of the poem’s narrative framework. More simply, it is “Milton’s Limbo,” since, even though the narrator does make out that it was known to popular tradition, it is Milton’s invention.Ī minor wonder in Satan’s odyssey to the new world, the episode has attracted relatively little sustained attention in the massive literature on Paradise Lost. The area, the narrator says, has “since call’d / the Paradise of Fools” but it is also known to critics as the Limbo of Vanity, since the narrator describes it as “a Limbo large and broad” 1 and “vanity” is a key term in the passage. ![]() It is interesting because Satan’s act marks the spot: in a rambunctious epic catalogue, the narrator asserts that this expanse will later come to serve as halfway house and junkyard for Satan’s unknowing imitators and imitations. One of the most interesting places in the geography of Paradise Lost is the stretch of rim on which Satan, breathing from his wild journey through Chaos, walks and considers before diving into the world, down on his way to earth and Eden.
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