“The Hollow Deep of Hell”: Infernal landscapes in Richard Crashaw’s “Sospetto d’Herode” and John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Since Peregrine Philips’s publication of Poetry by Richard Crashaw in 1785, literary critics have acknowledged Milton’s indebtedness to Crashaw’s “Sospetto d’Herode.” In Paradise Lost, intertextual echoes consistently testify to the fact that Milton shared Crashaw’s conception of hell as a concrete place. Their depictions of infernal landscapes amplify characteristics found in literary works from the Antiquity, the Scriptures and the writings of Church Fathers, notably John Chrysostom and Augustine, to help readers visualise hell and to underscore the tangible materiality of hell supporting a literal interpretation of the torments experienced there. We first focus on the question of the location of hell, then we consider the physical properties characterizing the concrete nature of the underworld. We conclude our investigation with an analysis of the anatomical metaphors of the heart and of the womb pertaining to the representation of the perverse body-landscape of hell.