SOURCE: “The Descent to Light,” in The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton's Poetry, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, pp. 122-42.

In the following essay, which was originally published in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology in 1961, Allen suggests that Paradise Lost should be thought of as an allegory about allegory and sees the movement in the epic as similar to that in the myths of Orpheus and Hercules, as the characters descend into darkness before ascending to light.

Though the English Protestants of the seventeenth century were, to their ultimate spiritual distress, so devoted to the literal interpretation of the Bible that they considered it the primary and superior reading, their affection for the letter and the historical sense did not prevent them from searching the text for types and allegories. This practice, of course, bore the taint of popery and hindered the full powers of the...