Paradise Lost
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Paradise Lost
John Milton
Poetry
James Mustich
Aug 13, 2018
A tale of forbidden fruit, Paradise Lost can be a forbidding poem, for it advances dense theological arguments about temptation, sin, predestination, and punishment in language that is radically unlike modern English: Milton’s unrhymed pentameter lines, populated with an esoteric, Latinate vocabulary that can make even Shakespeare seem conversational, defy casual reading. In its early episodes, as it makes its serpentine way to the Garden of Eden to recount Eve and Adam’s fall from grace, the poem passes through an imaginative terrain that invests ideas of rebellion, fate, and free will with brilliant colors. In fact, Milton’s artistic engagement with these themes overwhelms the certainties of any dogma, until the reader feels their metaphysical force as an almost physical presence. Milton’s epic resounds with a majesty no other work in the language approaches; to feel its power one must speak it aloud, letting the sounds orchestrate the intricate sense into a melody beyond explanation, a kind of swelling reality that transports us from heaven and hell to the human world, just as Adam and Eve, at the poem’s close, set out toward history from the realms of myth.
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Dave Agrati
Apr 9, 2020
a
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Debra Hanff
May 23, 2020
Yes!
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