ABSTRACT
If we approach the language-tactics of Paradise Lost from the inside rather than externally, we see that these tactics are not only the best but perhaps the only possible means of bringing the poem into imaginative life. The manner in which the language of the poem is held away from nature enables it to convey the quality of events that are beyond and prior to nature. Distancing, however, is not disconnection; through the relief of similes and other devices the language maintains its relationship with the everyday. Further, the verse paragraph, with its contention between metrical and grammatical forces, and the syntax, with its delayed resolutions, microcosmically enact the drama of the poem in the drama of the language. The simultaneous sense of both pattern and process is achieved through the backward and forward links of imagery and the manner in which the moment of local life is repeatedly made to open into the whole poem. The style may be formally that of secondary epic; but it satisfies with true creative fidelity the demands of both architectural and organic decorum.
