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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... human reason,18 but Paradise Lost subjects them to precisely that review and begins by allowing, perhaps even encouraging, the thought that God's ways are indeed in need of justification. It is Satan who voices the aphoristic claim “Not ...
... human memory upon the acts it remembers. And the fall does not prove either Satan victorious or God hypocritical ... humanity of its fallenness—precisely because it recognizes that our “abilities and perceptions” allow and lead us to ask ...
... human ordinance” (ibid., 16) rather than by divine decree. Milton's politics are underwritten by the belief that “all men were naturally borne free,” but that civil government is a response to the “wrong and violence” that followed the ...
... human. A social structure that permits some individuals to assume superiority over others grants them, according to Milton, “dominion undeserved” (12.27): “man over men / He made not lord, such title to himself / Reserving, human left ...
... humanity can never fully achieve it. Inequality is part of our fallen condition. Some critics, however, see ... human words spoken in Eden, and they humbly articulate her understanding of her own agency in the redemptive action ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |