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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... night” (1.50), echoes the fall of the Titans in Hesiod's Theogony (664–735), which also took nine days. Satan and the other fallen angels are the focus, too, of many of the striking epic similes (e.g., the rebellious angels lying “thick ...
... night . . . Through Heaven's wide champaign” as he returns from the rebel angels to God (6.1–2)—and depth, for the rebel angels dig up “the celestial soil” and find “beneath” the surface raw materials for their arms (6.509–20). It has ...
... night, / To none communicable in earth or Heaven” (7.121–24), a strangely obscurantist prohibition that does not make it at all clear what is being disallowed. If the limit is only “things not revealed,” then seemingly nothing in the ...
... night 50 To mortal men, he with his horrid crew Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf, Confounded° though immortal; but his doom defeated Reserved him to more wrath, for now the thought Both of lost happiness and lasting pain ...
... night of Troy's fall, so “changed from the living Hector” (Aeneid 2.275–76). Cf. Isa. 14:12: “How art thou fallen . . . O Lucifer.” Satan's shift from “fallen” to “changed” suggests an unwillingness to admit what has happened. 94–97 ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |