Differences and Difficulties in Description in Milton

What is it about the human imagination that allows one to conceptualize the deepest, darkest hell yet makes it difficult to envision heaven? Even Milton had his problems with the descriptions of God and heaven in Paradise Lost as opposed to the relative ease he had with Satan and hell. William Blake said, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he …

…humanity’s love for the volatile that makes the drama of Satan’s struggle so much more absorbing than the monotony of God’s stability. It is the physicality ingrained in our minds that allow us into hell, yet disengage us from heaven. It is because we are human that we readily hear the hiss of the forked-tongue, and it is because we are human that heaven’s universal hum often falls upon deaf ears.