Milton VS Pope

A Crime of Fate In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve commit the first sin, and from this point on, all other sins are mere copies of this. Alexander Pope uses this to his benefit when he depicts the crime in The Rape of the Lock. By alluding to Milton’s work, Pope is able to comically refer to the cutting of a lock of hair as a tragic and epic event. In doing this, he …

…allusions to John Milton’s Paradise Lost prove it to be a very cunning piece. The reader can not place blame on Sir Plume, for like Adam, he was a victim of beauty and love. At the same time, we can not look towards Clarissa because she was only acting the way her beauty would force her to. This was a crime not meant to tear two families apart, but paradoxically, a crime of fate.