Hellenic and Hebraic Elements in Milton's Poetry

Milton devoted to form and coherence which separates him from the great romantic. This gives separated him from the great romantics. This gives a delicacy and granite to the beauty if his verse. Like Ben Jonson he favoured the Hellenic or classical conventions in performance to the happy-go-lucky methods of romanticism. But like Jonson he did not follow scholarship to freeze his creative imagination. This Hellenic quality is exhibited to the best on the early poems—“A’Allegro”, La Penseloso,” Comus” and “Lycidas”. These poems have all the youthful charms and freshness and show off the lighter and more fanciful side of Milton’s genius. 

In his address to Melancholy, Milton says,” come, Pensivenun, devout and pure,” there is also a stateliness of manners added to the sense of beauty which makes Milton’s poetry highly dignified, unsurpassed and unequalled.

Paradise lost is considered the most Hebraic of great English poems. Milton codifies and concentrated all his puritan meditations on the Bible. He points the visions received from the Bible. He freely interprets the scripture but with utmost faith. He believes in the authenticity of the bible and its sacredness. Milton projects himself his feelings, knowledge and aspirations into the characters of the epic, both the primitive human creatures and the superhuman beings whether heavenly or hell or inferno. There s a complicit between his faith and his nature which shows sympathy in spite of the poet’s intentions. 

The moral thesis of Genesis is submission to the Almighty which makes disobedience on to sin. In spite of himself Milton was in deep sympathy with Satan that great rebel of Heaven and the Enemy of God. It is into Satan that Milton has most of himself, his pride and temperament. Milton as a sincere believer wanted to justify the ways to God to man.