Citation:
Date Published:
1 Jan, 2020Abstract:
This essay argues that the temporal adverb “meanwhile” marks a series of key moments in Paradise Lost, in which an endless succession is built into the present moment. Hitherto overlooked by the critics, this duration is represented in the poem as a concrete, coherent, and intelligible form, which opens the possibility of transformation implicit in the monistic scale of “one first matter all.” Milton models this structure on Aristotle’s theory of the infinite presented in Physics III, yet he goes beyond Aristotle in representing the infinite as the distinctive feature of moral life. In the poem’s representation of hell or the postlapsarian condition, “meanwhile” serves as a mere indexical adverb, the function of which is to designate temporal or spatial shifts. The possibility of transformation, which “meanwhile” opens in the present moment, is reserved in Milton’s poem to the prelapsarian or repentant mind.
October 2020: Ayelet Langer is an assistant professor in the Department of English Literature at the University of Haifa. Her research interests are Early Modern literature with an emphasis on John Milton’s poetry and its intellectual sources and engagements. Langer published articles in Milton Studies, EMLS, Notes & Queries, and in Irrtum – Error – Erreur (Miscellanea Mediaevalia Band 40), ed. Andreas Speer and Maxime Mauriège; her new work is forthcoming in UTQ, Modern Philology, and Philosophy and Literature. Her current project is a book on Milton and time.