Chapter Four. The Fall and Rise of Eve

A Poet can seldom have justice done to his imagination … it can scarcely be conceived how Milton's Blindness might here aid the magnitude of his conceptions as a bat in a large gothic vault.

Daylight is safer; although one must remember that so great a protagonist of Heavenly Light was not saved from blindness, the domain of the infinite and the horrors of the formless, any more than the Forms of Plato saved him and his public-thing from the poets.

The Keatsian ideal of becoming a “fledged” poet who can “fly through air and space without fear” is founded on the poetic flights of Milton in Paradise Lost. “Through utter and through middle darkness borne”, or floundering between “waters dark and deep” and the incomprehensible “void and formless infinite”, the poet is as much an explorer within the extraordinary landscapes of his own poem as is Satan, winding his “oblique way” in pure air, or “Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, / Half flying”. This sense of a