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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... serpents after the fall of Adam and Eve, are “permitted” to resume “their lost shape” (10.574); or why hypocrisy is allowed to walk invisible to all but God. These cannot be questions that merely prove us fallen, but questions that ...
... serpent, Satan uses his ability to talk and reason to demonstrate to Eve that some actual benefit inheres in the apple: “O sacred, wise, and wisdomgiving plant, / Mother of science, now I feel thy power / Within me clear not only to ...
... serpent” [10.514–15]), which not only means “unwilling,” as in modern usage, but also retains its Latin sense of “struggling”; or in sonorous blends of complex Latinate and simple Saxon words: hell described as a “dark opprobrious den ...
... serpent, or rather Satan in the serpent, who, revolting from God and drawing to his side many legions of angels, was by the command of God driven out of Heaven with all his crew into the great deep. Which action passed over, the poem ...
... serpent, he it was, whose guile, Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived The mother of. 17. chiefly: seems to ... serpent: here, as in 12.383, refers to “that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan” (Rev. 20:2–3) more distinctly ...
Contents
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The Life of Milton | 407 |
A Chronology of the Main Events in Miltons Life | 425 |