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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... echo of Isaiah 6 betrays his decidedly unconventional understanding of what it means to be a poet. There the Hebrew prophet is purified for his chosen task, as a seraph touches his lips with a live coal taken from God's altar. Milton's ...
... echoes of Homer, Virgil, Tasso, and Spenser, but Milton invokes recognizable epic scenes and conventions not to claim his place in the tradition but to proclaim his superiority over it. “The precursors return in Milton,” as Harold Bloom ...
... echoes the fall of the Titans in Hesiod's Theogony (664–735), which also took nine days. Satan and the other fallen ... echo of Aeneid 6.309–10). The fallen angels transformed into pagan gods are presented in a parody of the Homeric ...
... echoes the description of Satan and Beelzebub rising from the burning lake, “Both glorying to have scaped the ... echo in Sin and Death's “adventurous work” (10.255). Perhaps the differing scale of aspiration allows the parallels between ...
... echo of the mystifying voice from the whirlwind that answered Job, but a reasoned and irrefutable argument. What invalidates Satan's position is not its political logic. Abdiel willingly grants that it is “unjust, / That equal over ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |