The Inconceivable Utopia of Gulliver's Travels and Paradise Lost In Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels and John Milton's Paradise Lost, the reader is presented with two lands representing utopias. To Swift, this land is an island inhabited by horse-like creatures called Houyhnhnms who rule over man like beasts called Yahoos. For Milton, the Garden of Eden before the fall of man represents paradise. In it, Adam and Eve are pure and innocent, untested and faithful to God. The American Heritage Dictionary defines utopia as “an ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political, and moral aspects.” And while Houyhnhnm Land and the Garden of Eden may seem like ideally perfect places, they are not. In fact, they contradict our ideas about utopia. Our fascination with utopias comes from our attraction to and pursuit of progress within our own society. We study utopias with the hope that one day our society will evolve toward such a society. But what often goes unnoticed is that if our society improves enough to become utopian, it cannot improve any further. Therefore, it will be rigid and unchanging, the opposite of what it was when it evolved into its elevated state. This is a terrible truth for us, because we place value and virtue in ideas of desire and progress. Our reason tells us: once in an ideal country, desire cannot simply cease to exist, because desire is part of our human nature. And our reason is right. An ideal society should enhance our human nature, not suppress it. As we desire a perfect society, we know that a perfect society could not exist without our desire. And as long as we want it, we hope for progress. The idea that a utopia would not allow such progress to occur is enough to make us stop believing in the utop...... middle of paper ......ames Holly. “Milton and the Art of War.” John Milton, poet and humanist: essays by James Holly Hanford. Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve U, 1966. 185-223. Lock, F. P. The Politics of Gulliver's Travels. Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1980. Milton, John. Paradise lost. Ed. Roy Flannagan. New York: Macmillan, 1993. Patrides, C. A. Milton and The Christian Tradition. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) Revard, Stella Purce. War in Heaven. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980. Rodino, Richard H. "The Study of Gulliver's Travels, Past and Present." Swift's Critical Approaches to Teaching. New York: AMS Press, 1992. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Mahwah, New Jersey: Watermill Press, 1983. Tuveson, Ernest. (Ed.) Paradise Lost: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.., 1964.