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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... desire to depoliticize Milton's poem as much as to claim the poem for the neoclassicism of his own age, but it indeed shows that Milton has self-consciously followed “the Rules of Epic Poetry” (Spectator, 2, 539), enabling, in Addison's ...
... desire to pursue “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (1.16), claiming, through the ironic quotation of Ariosto (see 1.16n.), his own radical originality and announcing his aspirations to outdo his literary peers. The narrator's ...
... desire for a mate that is his equal, and God seems pleased with his request; yet Raphael and Christ, just as. 32 Mary Nyquist, however, sees this as merely another hierarchical gesture: “Eve's 'naming' becomes associated not with ...
... Desire. of. Knowledge”. Yet knowledge can hardly be an unproblematic concept in a poem where “death . . . and all our woe” (1.3) are the consequences of eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. The particular form of Satan's assault on ...
... desire to know” (4.522–23). How can this be bad, especially in a poem almost half of which is devoted to explicit scenes of education? Yet clearly in the poem the “desire to know” often does seem dangerous, something not to be excited ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |