We've all heard of John Milton's poem Paradise Lost and maybe we were even forced to read some of it in school at some point, but have any of us really sat down to read it? Recently I started reading Paradise Lost. I became mesmerized by the language of the thing: "Him the almighty power \ Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky \ With hideous ruin and combustion down \ To bottomless perdition, there to dwell \ In adamantine chains and penal fire, \ Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms." I started first in a free edition on Project Gutenberg's Web site, but then I ran into cryptic passages like this one (I've bolded the most perplexing part): "Say first, for heaven hides nothing from thy view \ [ ... ] what cause \ Moved our grand parents in that happy state \ [ ... ] to fall off \ From their creator, and transgress his will \ For one restraint, lords of the world besides?" So I decided to get a better edition and decided on the Longman ed. edited by Alastair Fowler after reading dozens of reviews on Amazon.com. It's a pricey edition (about $60), but well worth it and the annotations are both copious and, more importantly, extremely useful. If you're going to bother reading this poem at all, you'd better be prepared to put a lot of time into it. There are some commentators like Philip Pullman (author of the sci-fi tract His Dark Materials) who think you should read it straight-through just focusing on the sound of the poem, but I think this is a meat-headed approach.
What do other forum members have to say about this work?
Topic: "Paradise Lost"