Rhetoric and Rethinking in Bentley's Paradise Lost

Abstract

FROM ITS EARLIEST RECEPTION, Paradise Lost has proved an imaginatively compelling work. This is partly because of its rhetorical complexity: the poem depends on its readers’ ability to hold an attenuated sense in the mind and follow it through many lines of verse; it demands attention. It is also because, at crucial moments, it offers passages which approach dramatised simulacra of thought. 1 Satan is the character most prone to sharing the stages of his mental process; he thinks as he speaks, or rather his words think for him: the rhetorical structures of his utterances invite collaborative acts of cognition in his readers, and the insights his words engender, though they might be corrupt, misleading, or plain wrong, move and live in the text. This dramatic mobility is perhaps most clearly seen at the start of Book IV, when Satan, crouching on Mount Niphates, soliloquises about ruin, falling, and forgiveness. As comprehension dawns in carefully articulated stages, he talks himself into an inevitability of antagonism: he is driven in reflexive convulsion back inside the mind he had vauntingly described as ‘its own place’. ‘Me miserable!’ ,h e cries:‘Which way shall I flie | Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire? | Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell’. 2 This has the shock of sudden mental reach, but also the