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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... created free and rational, “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” as God insists (3.99). Evil is a function of free choice, thus acquitting God of responsibility for its existence, which is always and only ontologically ...
... created as a character no less (and no more) than any of the others who populate the poem. Indeed his relation to Milton is surprisingly like the heterodox relation of Milton's Christ to Milton's God: he is “begotten” and cannot ...
... created by and for the people, it follows that “the people [may], as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retaine or depose him . . . meerly by the liberty and right of free born Men to be govern'd ...
... created” him (4.43), but publicly he must insist the angels were “selfbegot, self-raised / By our own quickening power” (5.860–61). Neither Heaven nor hell represents a political ideal for Milton.30 Satan's revolutionary principles are ...
... creation, last and best / Of all God's works” (9.896–97)—at once recognizes her excellence and suggests, like the familiar feminist joke, that her belated creation enabled God to improve upon the prototype. But if Adam's praise merely ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |