Preface: Miltonic Poetics

Abstract

When Milton’s Death, poised at the gates of hell, upturns his nostril to snuff the smell of mortal change on earth, we find a strikingly compressed nexus of theology, ontology, cosmology, and intertextuality in Paradise Lost. The primordial snuff is Death’s response to his mother, Sin, who, with Satan’s success in tempting Adam and Eve, feels “new strength within me rise, / Wings growing, and dominion given me large / Beyond this deep” (10.243–45) and urges Death to go with her to earth, “For Death from Sin no power can separate” (10.251).1 Death, a perpetually ravenous “meagre shadow” (10.264), needs no further encouragement, avowing: