Paradise LostParadise Lost remains as challenging and relevant today as it was in the turbulent intellectual and political environment in which it was written. This edition aims to bring the poem as fully alive to a modern reader as it would have been to Milton's contemporaries. It provides a newly edited text of the 1674 edition of the poem--the last of Milton's lifetime--with carefully modernized spelling and punctuation. Marginal glosses define unfamiliar words, and extensive annotations at the foot of the page clarify Milton's syntax and poetics, and explore the range of literary, biblical, and political allusions that point to his major concerns. David Kastan's lively Introduction considers the central interpretative issues raised by the poem, demonstrating how thoroughly it engaged the most vital--and contested--issues of Milton's time, and which reveal themselves as no less vital, and perhaps no less contested, today. The edition also includes an essay on the text, a chronology of major events in Milton's life, and a selected bibliography, as well as the first known biography of Milton, written by Edward Phillips in 1694. |
From inside the book
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... Heaven, of course, offers the most obvious epic parallel, and here the point is clearest in its comic deflation of epic warfare. If the war in Heaven is not mock heroic, certainly it is, in William Riggs' witty turn of phrase, “mocked ...
... Heaven” (3.691), is deceived by Satan, unable to see through Satan's disguise and dissimulation. The narrator explains that “neither man nor angel can discern / Hypocrisy,” which is seen only by God and, “by his permissive will,” is ...
... Heaven is for thee too high / To know what passes there” and warns him to “be lowly wise” (8.172–73). This is not advice that Milton takes to heart, for his poem indeed presumes to know “what passes” in Heaven: “Into the Heaven of Heaven's ...
... heaven, republican on earth.”29 In fact the monarchist politics of Milton's Heaven are exactly what underpin his own republican commitments. The poem establishes the crucial difference between an earthly king and Heaven's “Immutable ...
... Heaven but because he thinks that “one step higher / Would set [him] highest” (4.50–51). And, if in Heaven, God's absolute rule is ontologically justified, it also fails, precisely for that reason, to provide a model for earthly ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |