The Renaissance is a period of heightened genre consciousness in literary theory and poetic practice, and Milton is arguably the most genreconscious of English poets. His great epic, Paradise Lost, is preeminently a poem about knowing and choosing - for the Miltonic Bard, for the characters, for the reader. One ground for such choices is genre, Milton's own choice and use of a panoply of literary forms, with their accumulated freight of cultural significances shared between author and audience.

Critics have long recognized and continue to discover in Milton's poem an Edenic profusion of thematic and structural elements from a great many literary genres and modes, as well as a myriad of specific allusions to major literary texts and exemplary works. Almost everyone agrees that Paradise Lost is an epic whose closest structural affinities are to Virgil's Aeneid, and that it undertakes in some fashion to redefine classical heroism in Christian terms (Bowra; Di Cesare; Hunter; Steadman 1967). We now recognize as well how many major elements derive from other epics and epic-like poems. From Homer's Iliad: a tragic epic subject - here, the death and woe resulting from an act of disobedience; a hero (Satan) motivated like Achilles by a sense of injured merit; and the battle scenes in heaven. From the Odyssey: Satan's wiles and craft and Satan's Odysseus-like adventures on the perilous seas (of Chaos) and in new lands. From Hesiod's Theogony: many aspects of the war in heaven between the good and evil angels. And from Ovid's Metamorphoses: the pervasiveness of change and transformation - diabolic and divine - in the Miltonic universe (Blessington 1979; Mueller; Aryanpur; Steadman 1968, 194-208; Hughes 1965; Revard; Harding 1946; Lewalski 1985, 71-6; Martz)