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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... light among us” (ibid., 147), which earlier had illuminated the path of the godly, was now eclipsed as England called “a captain back for Egypt” (ibid., 149). Yet Paradise Lost pointedly announces itself as a poem of restoration as well ...
... light in Book 3 (1–55) and Satan's invocation to the sun in Book 4 (32–41). But Milton makes us see the parallel between the ambition of Satan and the presumption of his narrator, not neatly as “emulation opposite” (2.298) but as an ...
... light of heaven / As from the center thrice to the utmost pole” (1.73–74). Between Heaven and hell is the “wild abyss” of chaos, the “womb of nature” that is the repository of unformed matter that God has not yet endowed with spirit and ...
... light, but rather darkness visible” (1.61–63). Hell too is called an abyss, but, unlike the abyss that is chaos, the abyss of hell is “hollow” (2.518) and its inhabitants conform to the nature of their prison. Thus Satan can say “myself ...
... light, he poignantly, but without self-pity, calculates what has been lost with his blindness: “Thus with the year / Seasons return, but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn, / Or sight of vernal bloom or ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |