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Milton's serpent and the birth of pagan error.(John Milton's Paradise Lost)

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From: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Date: 20070101
Author:Harding, Pitt

I

When Milton's Satan enters the serpent and approaches Eve in Paradise Lost, he comes equipped with more than a crested head and a "burnisht Neck of verdant Gold" (9.501). (1) He also bears an impressive array of classical allusions. The perplexed reader who turns to annotations will find that notes keyed to line numbers, however helpful, typically offer little aid in drawing meaningful connections among them. As Alastair Fowler observes in the introduction to his richly annotated edition, however, "Milton's allusions to ancient epics have turned out to be so consistently ...

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