
Why you should re-read Paradise Lost (2017) - emptybits
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170419-why-paradise-lost-is-one-of-the-worlds-most-important-poems
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akkshu92
If you haven't read it already and need help interpreting it, you can take
this free course on edx.

[https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:DartmouthX+DART.EN...](https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:DartmouthX+DART.ENGL.02X+1T2018/c0e0d30dac4848c7a13a177fc0f46e40/)

I took this course to understand what the whole fuss around 'Paradise Lost'
meant. I was utterly mind-blown, learning its snide references to free will,
tyranny, slavery, civil liberty, etc. in the poem. What I once thought was a
retelling of the Bible, surprised me with its political nuances.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Good courses/teachers change everything.

I thought I hated literature and philosophy until I took a philosophy 101
course that I procrastinated until my final semester at UT.

It was basically two professors (one was Dutch that was co-teaching the course
until he would transition to be a stand-alone professor) and a class of 12
students at a university where I was used to intro courses in 200-student
lecture halls.

The enthusiasm of the professors was contagious. And they turned text that
would have been boring / misunderstood if read on my own into lines that were
couched in all sorts of humor and greater commentary about the world, and I
was hooked. They taught me how to enjoy literature that otherwise would have
seemed totally dull and dry and it was a real gift.

Over a decade later, I was at a bar and somehow Plato's Gorgias came up with a
stranger and we both half-jokingly agreed that Callicles was right about the
world. And I thought about how thankful I was for that philosophy class once
again.

~~~
RNCTX
I often think that if we ever achieve an automated AI-driven society
(unlikely, but bear with me), everyone will be a philosophy or literature PhD.

They're the only disciplines that make it fun to go to class.

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RNCTX
Paradise Lost was the highlight of my undergrad literature degree, by far.

You won't get 10% of it reading it alone on the first time. There are so many
little nuances and considerations and philosophical grey areas that someone
could spend a lifetime on it and still have things left to do.

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emptybits
Many ways to read this epic poem. Besides flat text versions from Wikisource
and Project Gutenberg, here's a PDF, typeset with 17th century inspiration:
[http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/paradiselost.pdf](http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/paradiselost.pdf)

~~~
vortex_ape
Thanks for this PDF! I was confused to see the words "Paradife Loft" and
thought that it was some issue with the PDF, which is not the case.

TIL that ſ (long s) is an archaic form of the lower case letter s.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s)

~~~
DrewRWx
In media, ſ (long s) is often used to signify a heightened version of the
American colonial and American Revolution periods.

The latter-day Futurama episode "All the Presidents' Heads" uses it as joke a
couple times when they time-warp during the American Revolution.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Is that actually an assertion that's true for media in general, or was it only
true for that gag in Futurama?

~~~
tsm
I do a lot with 18th-century music and living history, where long esses are
prevalent, and it's been a common point of confusion for students/the public
that turns into a gag. I released a book of original music a few years ago[1]
and people still call me a "compofer"

[1] - [https://github.com/tsmacdonald/first-
collection/blob/master/...](https://github.com/tsmacdonald/first-
collection/blob/master/cover.pdf)

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ivanmilles
A recommendation to the Dutch "precursor" to Paradise Lost: Vondel's "Lucifer"
is a tight five-act play along the same lines. It's about a century older than
Paradise Lost, with a contemporary energy that's quite fun and punchy, and a
quick read.

Noel Clark's translation gives it a modern air of office politics as Lucifer
and Beelzebub quarrel with Gabriel on how to behave in their shared workplace.

~~~
dhosek
There's a bit of OT apocrypha that's a likely source of inspiration for
_Paradise Regained_ , Milton's sequel to _Paradise Lost_. I believe it was the
Book of Adam (or something similarly titled). A quick Google search doesn't
turn up anything likely and the I lent the volume I had which included this
apocryphon to my brother who subsequently lost it at some point later, so I
only have 20+ year old memories of the book.

There's a long tradition of retellings and expansions of Biblical stories in
both Christianity and Judaism that also contributed a great deal to _Paradise
Lost_.

~~~
aspenmayer
Do you recall the title which contained the aforementioned apocryphal text?

~~~
dhosek
_Forgotten Books of Eden_. Apparently it's less obscure than I thought, which
gave me a Wikipedia article with the contents. The text was the First and
Second Book of Adam and Eve aka Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan. Wikipedia
article here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_Adam_and_Eve_with_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_Adam_and_Eve_with_Satan)

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pseudolus
Blake's illustrations for Paradise Lost can be found on Wikipedia [0]. They're
incredibly fine works of illustration that a web browser can't do justice to.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake%27s_illustration...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake%27s_illustrations_of_Paradise_Lost)

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zappo2938
When I first read it I thought about how hell experienced all the forms of
government in the Republic with democracy leading to tyranny. Then a few years
ago I started to reread it and couldn't find the pattern as though I made it
up all those years ago. It was just that I was so sure something was some way
and in the end it was just a hallucination.

~~~
unhammer
I most enjoyed the part where Satan, Moloc, Beelzebub and the rest of his
fellowship discuss whether to retake Heaven and by what strategy, and they end
up deciding that Satan alone shall sneak into Eden. I half expected him to say
he'd throw his ring into the fire there :-)

Blake was right though – the parts not about devils are quite forgettable.

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lukeholder
I had never read it, but just read the summary and couldn't believe the
similarity to Mormonism's creation/fall story. Which led me to this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlrPpbalG-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlrPpbalG-g)

~~~
RNCTX
It is a much different read if you approach it with some prior knowledge of
what it was intended to be. The preface plainly states that Milton wants to
"justify the ways of god to men."

The plot and structure are a direct knock-off of Homer's epic poems. Milton
followed a regimen of writing that was old before he was born, in that first
people would write lyrics and sonnets and then eventually hone their skills
toward writing an epic. So there's not a whole lot of meat, for lack of a
better word, in the structure of the poem itself. It is assumed that the
reader knows their classics and identifies the references themselves.

The clever parts are in the details. Milton's angels and demons have
philosophical/political debates and conversations which invite the reader to
consider hard questions and make conclusions of their own. Milton even
considers the mathematical and philosophical questions of _being_ in the poem,
for example. Satan asks permission of the "throne of Chaos" to travel through
his domain from Hell to Earth. Satan's plea to Chaos is that by creating his
universe, god stole from him and he should help anyone who opposes that
creation. So it is implied that Chaos is a force perhaps not comparable in
status to the one god, but certainly above immortal beings like angels and
demons, so perhaps Chaos and God are naturally opposed, entropy vs order, etc.
And even this is ideologically and theologically consistent down to the
detail. Satan doesn't really know how powerful Chaos is, but should he? Chaos
is older and greater than any angel or demon, so it follows that angels and
demons would not know exactly how powerful Chaos is, but would know that Chaos
is greater than they are. Similarly, the battle scene in heaven between
Satan's rebelling army and the angels loyal to God begins with all of them not
really knowing whether they can be killed or not. They consider whether all of
their fighting is for nothing, because they're immortal. This is another thing
that, logically and philosophically, they would not know on their own because
they didn't create themselves, after all. They _were created_ , and thus are
necessarily lesser than the creator who does know.

"Justify the ways of god to men" to Milton was an attempt to "fix" Christian
doctrine, to fill in the blanks and missing parts and make it all fit together
without any contradictions or failures of reason.

But here lie conclusions that are difficult to reason away: if Satan rebelled
against God and God is all-knowing, why didn't God stop him? Is all of
creation an experiment in free will (which makes everyone a pawn), or can God
himself not kill one of his immortal angels? If the latter, is he not really
God if there's something he cannot do? Was Jesus/The Son just a ruse to root
out disloyalty among angels?

And really all of these things get to "does the universe even matter or does
whatever created it not care about it?"

The whole thing is not just a religious text, although it is about a religious
doctrine. It's a text meant to teach people how to think, so that they would
overthrow their kings and noble rulers and rule themselves, just as Milton
portrayed in his last writing (a rewrite of the story of Samson Agonistes).

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dotsam
The audiobook read by Anton Lesser is worth listening to.

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bookofjoe
My first (and only) reading of it was in high school. Too soon.

~~~
ThinkingGuy
My high school English teacher explicitly advised us to wait until we were
"really old" to read Milton.

~~~
bookofjoe
Is 72 old enough?

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Der_Einzige
Paradise Lost is extremely poorly written religious fan-fiction. The first 4
chapters which describe how Lucifer became lucifer are actually sort of
interesting, and then the most boring, wordy, and repetitive of narratives are
told for the next 15? Chapters

I'd rather reread such (by comparison) brief works like "A tale of two cities"
because literally any other work was far less wordy and far more interesting.

Paradise Lost is the only book I've ever just put down and refused to finish
for a "honors" English class in senior year. If you are forced to read this
crap for a class - just find the sparknotes and read something more
comprehensible in the mean time.

~~~
tanseydavid
Comparing an Epic Poem to a Novel seems like an apples to oranges comparison
-- both fruit yet quite different from each other.

Calling it "crap" and "extremely poorly written religious fan-fiction" is
pretty bold (but also shallow).

Serious question: "why do you suppose it is that 'crap' like this manages to
survive on for a couple of hundred years?

