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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... Once Milton abandoned the Church for poetry, it was almost inevitable he would eventually write an epic. His was an imagination certain to be drawn to what he called the genre “of highest hope, and hardest attempting” (Works 3, part 1 ...
... once abjour'd and detested thraldom of Kingship” (Works 6, 117). “All this 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) ...
... once (3.78). If he knows, his knowledge is no more influential on the acts he foresees than is human memory upon the acts it remembers. And the fall does not prove either Satan victorious or God hypocritical, because good does come out ...
... once recognizes her excellence and suggests, like the familiar feminist joke, that her belated creation enabled God to improve upon the prototype. But if Adam's praise merely inverts their hierarchical relation, his request to God for a ...
... once “understand” that Eve is “inferior in the mind / And inward faculties” and yet several lines later admit that “Authority and reason on her wait / As one intended first, not after made,” sensing her “Greatness of mind” (8.540–57) ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |