There are three categories of myth in Paradise Lost, each of which is essential to the epic's proleptic structure: first, those myths identifying the pagan gods with the fallen angels; second, those myths used in comparisons with Eden, Adam, and Eve; finally, in Book xi, those myths that are types of the Old and New Testament revelation that Adam will receive. The first and third categories are evidences of God working in history, and these myths are consequently “fabled”, set in story form by the pagans; the second group have no historical reality and are only “feigned”, or fabricated. Milton uses these two words carefully. From another perspective, the first and second uses lead from the timelessness of prelapsarian existence to history. The third moves in reverse, from history to eternity, not of the world before the Fall but of the Christian glory to come.

Bertha's warning to Walther that her narrative not be taken for a Mdrchen provides a clue to an “intrinsic” Freudian psychological reading of “Eckbert,” a work which, like a dream or a fairy tale, has a “latent” as well as a “manifest” level. Bertha's narration is interspersed with compulsive confessions that point to her own repressed awareness of the symbolic meaning of her acts. On its latent level, her story is that of a narcissistic child's failure to attain the norm of productive social adaptation explicitly prescribed for her in the world of the work. Only in the fantastic “Waldeinsamkeit” does she approximate, briefly, “normal” socialization. Her theft of the jewels and killing of the two animals, in the context of her psychosocial and sexual development, is her definitive rejection of what they represent–the possibility of a productive life as wife and mother. The incestuous marriage symbolizes the fruitless union of two narcissistic characters who in the other love only themselves. Approached on a level other than that of logical causality, the story appears to have an inner coherence not previously appreciated.

Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes revives the ancient Greek notion that myth is the allegorical expression of natural philosophy. While Reynolds acknowledges the common Renaissance practice of moral and psychological al-legoresis, he insists that the truth-seeking exegete must read the ancient myths as “meere matter of Nature.” Most of the examples of allegoresis in Mythomystes reflect the interpretations of the pre-Socratic philosophers, while the divine sense of the Narcissus commentary recalls the eschatology implied in some of Plato's myths. In method Reynolds' allegoreses are syncretic, like those of Philo and Origen, and etymological, like those of the Stoics. Involved in the syncretism is a sort of Euhemerism that ascribes Hebraic mortality to otherwise pagan gods. A spatial, rather than a temporal, typology is also part of Reynolds' method. The etymologies in Mythomystes resemble those in Cicero's De Natura Deorum. Though Reynolds' theory, practice, and method of allegoresis are ancient, his concern with knowledge of the secrets of nature, like Bacon's, is modern. However, Reynolds' instrument, mythological allegoresis, seeks to recover: Bacon's, induction, to discover.

To understand the ironic force of Johnson's 1755 letter to the Earl of Chesterfield, we must appreciate not only their personal relationship, centered in 1746-48, and Chesterfield's indirect attempt to sponsor the Dictionary in 1754, but their literary and political relationship as well. Both men played a complex role in the politics of the 1737-44 period, Chesterfield as a leading member of the opposition, Johnson as political journalist. During these years, Johnson used Chesterfield's 1737 speech against the Playhouse Bill as basis for some arguments in his Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (1739), and later wrote Chesterfield's part in a number of “Parliamentary Debates.” Though Johnson favored the opposition position before 1740, in his “Debates,” under the requirement of appearing impartial, he often created for opposition speakers, especially Chesterfield, ironic arguments which redound to their discredit. Johnson's ability as ironist was considerable: comparison of the speeches he wrote for Chesterfield with collateral sources for these debates reveals that he intensified Chesterfield's opposition negativeness by increasing his ironical attacks upon the ministry in power. The effect is to satirize Chesterfield, rendering him ineffectual, divisive, and ridiculous through the creation of a literary and political persona. It is unlikely that Johnson forgot this persona during his hopeful personal relationship with and later neglect by Chesterfield. When the opportunity arose in 1755 for Johnson to address Chesterfield personally again, he fortified the “civil irony” of his celebrated letter with an ironic attack which recalls, and was perhaps influenced by, the satiric criticism he had leveled against Chesterfield through similar ironic techniques a dozen years earlier in the “Parliamentary Debates.”

In the eighteenth century a preference for Juvenal as a satirist eventually replaced the normal Augustan preference for Horace. But the post-Augustan image of Juvenal was selective and sometimes inaccurate. Critics emphasized his sublimity, his occasional pathos, and his supposedly rational piety, while ignoring his obscenity, wit, and rhetorical control. There are near parallels in post-Augustan satiric practice. In William Gifford, satire becomes invective; in Charles Churchill, declamation. The new satire borders on Richardsonian and even Gothic melodrama. Or, at the other extreme, it is pseudo-Horatian and almost at the vanishing point (Christopher Anstey's New Bath Guide). The mock-heroic dwindles into burlesque (Peter Pindar's The Lousiad). The breakdown of the Augustan equilibrium means, in satire, a progressive failure of irony and especially of ironic diminution. Churchill's Dedication to Warburton is an important exception. It uses the new image of Juvenal in the service of mock-panegyric and enforces the Augustan satirist's traditional view of evil as privation.

The poetic method of Pope's An Essay on Criticism is to demonstrate how wit can operate, through imagery, as both controlling and creative power. The poem's imagery suggests the relatedness of all human endeavor, defines the special place of criticism, indicates standards of value. Images modify one another to achieve subtle effects, communicate complex and delicate judgments. The multiplicity of imagery is never random; it works by purposeful reinforcement. Even individual images supply poetic and philosophic density. Particularly important is the figure of the “good man” which emerges gradually through the poem, exemplifying a technique characteristic of much of Pope's poetry: the heightening of significant figures to emblematic proportions to exemplify the reality of key abstractions. The form as well as the content of Pope's imagery is important, with metaphors in general indicating more crucial connections than similes reveal. Pope, unlike such predecessors as Cowley, uses both metaphor and simile to convey a set of complicated paraphrasable ideas. He attempts to promulgate doctrine and to enjoin the proper feelings and beliefs about it. The Essay on Criticism indicates that metaphor can provide organization without comprising the sole substance of a poem.

Milton's references in the preface to Samson Agonistes and in The Reason of Church Government to the Book of Revelation as tragedy have great significance for his drama. His cited authority, David Pareus, and several other Protestant commentators identified the Book of Revelation as tragedy on the basis of form (the alternation of dramatic episodes and Choruses) and subject—the spiritual combat of the Elect with Antichrist and their torment and suffering at his hands throughout all time, reversed only at the end of history when they share Christ's Apocalyptic victory over him. Protestant exegates often linked the Samson story typologically with the Book of Revelation, presenting Samson as type of the suffering Elect and the exercise of Samson's vocation as Judge (deliverer of God's people and executor of the wrath of God upon His enemies) as type of the Elect judging the world with Christ at the last day. This context assists the interpretation of Milton's Samson, bringing into focus its treatment of Samson's judgeship. The Samson Apocalypse link also brings a new perspective to certain moot questions: the date of the play, the interpretation of Samson's character, the presence of contemporary political reference, the nature of the drama's tragic effect.

As the only stable element of Milton's universe in Paradise Lost and the theological if not the dramatic center of the poem, heaven deserves more attention than it usually receives. Although Milton drew heavily upon the Biblical New Jerusalem, his heaven is unusual in being far more pastoral than the heaven of Revelation. Insofar as it resembles the New Jerusalem, heaven suggests the regality and power of God. The victory of the Son in his jeweled chariot, the best illustration of omnipotence in the poem, reflects the spirit of Protestant commentators on the final victory of Christ in Revelation. In its pastoral aspect heaven embodies the bliss and repose of the angels and foreshadows the sabbatical rest of the saints. The tradition of a pastoral heaven, entwined with the tradition of the earthly paradise, was transmitted primarily by medieval hymns and vision literature and by the Renaissance pastoral elegy. Milton's heavenly paradise offers the consolation of a bliss which resembles that of Eden and also a higher, festive joy arising from the continual praise of God. Heaven may be less engaging than Eden, but it is the image of the true city and the true paradise toward which the human drama moves.

Recent criticism of John Gay's poetry has largely continued to slight its merit or to misread it. Trivia has been especially mishandled, the chief critical faults being the tendency on the part of some to take the poem too seriously and to overlook a number of aspects that reinforce its mock-georgic nature. Gay was completely aware of what he was doing at all times in Trivia, and it is only when one reads the poem closely, with Dryden's translation of Virgil in mind, that a great deal of what he was indeed doing is clearly revealed. Not only did Gay go to Dryden's Virgil for particular phrases: “certain signs” of the weather, the “spoils” of Russia's “bear,” “callow care,” and a number of others, but he also used single words in the unusual senses Dryden had already employed: “infest” to mean “attack,” “contagion” to mean “fire,” “laborious” to mean “undergoing trouble and hardship,” as well as others. There is a whole vocabulary, available in Dryden's Virgil, to which he could have helped himself, in addition to those borrowings that can be demonstrated. A number of passages in Trivia also take their point of departure from Dryden's Virgil. When one adds an occasional clear echo of the Bible or Milton, all intended to enhance the mock-dignity of his poem, there can be no doubt of Gay's poetic competence.

In spite of his commitment to the classical tradition, Matthew Arnold saw tragedy not as man's violation of a supernal order, but as his victimization by a historical order. Arnold's essay on Lord “Falkland”, rather than the 1853 Preface, provides us with our most useful guide to his understanding of the tragic experience. In “Falkland” Arnold explicitly indicates that history becomes a tragic action in epochs of revolution when civilized life breaks down into a clash between a superannuated orthodoxy and a banal radicalism. In such periods, gifted individuals are left to wander, hopelessly, between two worlds. Four important works are informed by this vision. Empedocles on Etna shows that the protagonist's crisis is precipitated by the isolation Empedocles suffers in a world dominated by superstition on the one hand and sophistry on the other. “Lucretius” was to have used a similar background, the revolutionary clash between the conservative “Milonians” and the democratic “Clodians”. In Balder Dead Arnold turned to the myth of the Twilight of the Gods in order to dramatize the theme of “Falkland”. Finally, the heroine in Merope is forced to choose between the barbarism of the old order and the nullity of the new one.

Keats often imagines the poetic process (the way poetry is created or conceived) as a flight from reality to some dreamworld of imagination. At other times it seems an identification with and heightening of the concrete and actual. What mediates between these two apparently contradictory views of aesthetic experience are certain fundamental analogies borrowed from contemporary science, in particular chemistry, that underlie his whole view of the poetic imagination and its operation. Keats's favorite metaphors for poetic creation reveal how the imagination transmutes material phenomena or sensations into poetic or “essential” form in accordance with the principles of ethereal chemistry described by such a writer as Sir Humphry Davy and by a process remarkably akin to that of chemical distillation. The essential forms of poetry derive their reality both from the identity of material phenomena and the transforming power of the mind. Later, however, Keats's attitude toward this process undergoes a notable change. Thus the Hermes episode in Lamia can be read as a parody of his whole earlier sense of the poetic process and its authenticity. Keats's knowledge of and reliance on science becomes an integral part of the more ambivalent view of poetry that characterizes his later career.

The inability of readers to identify themselves with the hero of Paradise Regained, far from being an obstacle to the success of the poem, is an essential part of the central conflict within the poem. For Christ, although created as both God and man, moves closer to the divine as the action of the poem progresses. In doing so, Christ renounces the hope of redeeming this world in human or secular terms. He must do this to fulfill his role as the Son of God; but the reader regrets this necessity. Consequently there is a tension throughout the poem between the divine and the human nature of Christ. The reader is asked to accept the uncomfortable fact that Christ's redemption of the world must be made in divine not in human terms. To gain eternal life for us He must die to the life of this world. The truth of this Christian paradox is assumed by Milton; but Milton recognizes that this Christian truth conflicts with our human desires for a victory within this world. And it is this conflict between the divine and the human that provides the emotional center of the poem.