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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... hope, will find that most of what was there is here too, but in more accessible form, and bolstered by another generation of thought about the poem, necessarily unavailable to Hughes. Hughes had first published his edition of Paradise ...
... hope, will not only find something in the edition to make it clear I really was paying attention but also will find something to keep the old arguments alive. In addition, Deborah Wilkes must be thanked, because she believed. She will ...
... hope, and hardest attempting” (Works 3, part 1, 237). Even as he was inhabiting “the cool element of prose” as he engaged in his early polemical writing, he was imagining himself “soaring in the high region of his fancies with his ...
... hope that “God may raise of these stones to become children of a reviving libertie,” as England, driven by “the deluge of this epidemic madness” to restore the monarchy, stood at “a precipice of destruction” (ibid., 148–49). The tide ...
... hope, aspires / Beyond thus high” (2.7–8), is seen to be not unlike the narrator, who aspires “with no middle flight . . . to soar above the Aonian mount” (1.14–15). In the invocation in Book 1, the narrator can criticize Satan for ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |