Milton and Ecology

Abstract

In Milton and Ecology, Ken Hiltner engages with literary, theoretical, and historic approaches to explore the ideological underpinnings of our prevalent environmental crisis. Focusing on Milton's rejection of dualistic theology, metaphysical philosophy, and early-modern subjectivism, Hiltner argues that Milton anticipates certain prevailing essential ecological arguments. Even more remarkable is that Milton was able to integrate these arguments with biblical sources so seamlessly that his interpretative 'Green' reading of scripture has for over three centuries been entirely plausible. This study considers how Milton, from the earliest edition of the Poems, not only sought to tell the story of how through humanity's folly Paradise on earth was lost, but also sought to tell how it might be regained. This intriguing study will be of interest to eco-critics and Milton specialists alike.

Paradise Lost: Difference between Adam and Eve’s Lament on Leaving Paradise - A Contrastive Analysis

“…However, according to Mattison (2007), "she lives in a garden, and she needs to understand how it is constructed" (p. 82). Hiltner (2003) cites Mc Colley saying that "Milton's Eve is different from all other Eves by the fact that she does her work seriously," as Milton's Garden is "a real garden really needing care" (p. 53). Thus Strier suggests that Eve seems to have "an aesthetic aversion to the messiness of Eden (IV, 629-631) as well as an intuitive sense of how to intervene usefully in it (V, 212-216)" (p.42).…”

“Domestick Adam” versus “Adventrous Eve”: Arguments about Gardening in Milton's Eden

“…7 Hiltner develops this line of thinking into an argument that Eve is the "a 'spirit of place' which guards both the place and human beings" until tempted by Satan "to 'uproot' herself from The Garden." 8 Eve also emerges as an ethicallyengaged and ecologically-aware being in McColley's Milton's Eve, where she is presented as attempting to balance her relationship with Adam with her "responsibilities to other beings." 9 By the time McColley wrote Poetry and Ecology (2007), she could read Eve's "daily attention to the nursery" as calling her "perilously away from Adam on the morning of the Fall" but as "exemplary" in itself because McColley's ecocritical reading makes central the tending of plants.…”

The Greening of Milton Criticism

“…55 And Ken Hiltner sees Paradise Lost as challenging twenty-first-century readers with the belief that 'we are all ''Adams'' (literally ''creatures made of Earth''), who, faced with our Earth-bound nature, may either choose to renew the bond or scorn it along with our future'. 56 With that final remark as a cue, and since Milton took as the narrative basis for his 'revelation of dwelling' what Bate calls 'the controlling myth of ecopoetics' -'a Rousseauesque story about imagining a state of nature prior to the fall into property, into inequality and into the city' 57 -let me invoke in conclusion an embryonic myth for the twenty-first century that parallels the closing lines of Paradise Lost. None of the works I have discussed mentions the theories of James Lovelock, although the personifications of earth -as an 'all-bearing mother' (Book V, l. 338), who 'felt the wound' of the human fall into sin (Book IX, l. 782) and whose 'bowels' were later 'rifled' with 'impious hands' (Book I, ll.…”