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Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Editions)

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Paradise Lost was not part of my core curriculum in science and mathematics. I was of course aware that scholars considered it a great work, a classic. But it seemed a bit daunting - long, difficult, dated, and possibly no longer relevant.

A few years ago I made two fortunate decisions. I elected to read Milton's Paradise Lost and I bought the Norton Critical Edition (edited by Scott Elledge). I read and reread Paradise Lost over a period of three months as well as the 300 pages of the Norton critical commentary. I was stunned by the beauty and power of Milton. Why had I waited so long to even approach such a literary masterpiece?

Make no mistake. I had been right in several ways. Paradise Lost is difficult, it is long, and full appreciation requires an understanding of the historical and religious context. But Paradise Lost is a remarkable achievement. It explores questions regarding man and God that are as relevant today as in the 17th century. And the genius of Milton has never been surpassed.

I found the Norton footnotes extremely helpful - definitions for rare or archaic words and expressions, explanations of the historical context, and links to the critical commentary section. The footnotes are at the page bottom, making them readily accessible.

The Norton biographical, historical, and literary commentaries were fascinating in their own right. I may well as spent as many hours reading commentary as with Paradise Lost itself.

John Milton led a remarkable life. His enthusiastic euology on Shakespeare was included in the second folio edition of Shakespeare in 1632. This was Milton's first public appearance as an author! While traveling as a young man he "found and visited" the great Galileo, old and blind, a house prisoner of the Inquisition for his astronomical heresy. Years later Milton, a close supporter of Cromwell, barely escaped the scaffold at the Restoration and was at risk for some period afterwards. Many considered Milton no more than an outcast, now old and blind himself, a republican and regicide who had escaped death by too much clemency. Within a few years this aging blind outcast created one of the masterpieces of the English language.

Milton broke all English tradition by writing Paradise Lost in blank verse. Homer in Greek and Vergil in Latin had used blank verse, but English demanded rhyme. Although others failed to imitate Milton's blank verse (I suspect that none wanted to be compared directly with genius), the praise was without exception. Dryden, a master of rhyme, is attributed with saying, "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too".

Milton's characterization of Satan, Adam, Eve, the archangels Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel, and even God himself are masterful. The debates and arguments that evolve around free will, obedience, forbidden knowledge, love, evil, and guilt are timeless. And fascinating. And thought provoking.

Paradise Lost will require commitment and patience and thought. The commitment in time is substantial. (I enjoy Samuel Johnson's subtle comment: "None ever wished it longer than it is.") But the return is a personal experience with great literature, one of the masterpieces of the English language. I consider myself fortunate to have made such an investment.

I was assigned to read Paradise Lost on my own over the summer and I am so glad that I chose the Norton Critical edition. Obviously, reading Paradise Lost is a daunting task for anyone who isn't a religious historian and without the Norton Critical edition, I might not have finished the epic at all (which would be much of a loss, not only in my grades.)

This edition has a vast array of extremely helpful footnotes (have a Bible at hand for all those cross-references) and it has large margins for taking plenty of notes of your own. More than half of the book is a collection of various literature, excerpts and explanations that are also quite helpful.

Certainly, there is no doubt that Paradise Lost is an excellent work, but the Norton Critical edition is invaluable for any average person (like me) who wants to truly appreciate it. I highly recommend this.

There are so many editions of Milton's epic, so how does someone interested in owning a copy choose from the crowd? Unfortunately there are not many "bad" editions of Milton's poetry, so the decision requires effort, and every editor has their own interpretation (which is more or less valid than others') of their author. (Indeed, editors are always like secondary authors.) First a few quick words about NCEs. All have bigraphical, historical, literary backgrounds, and criticism that are outside the text (in this case _PL_) and are useful, or at the least interesting. But I do not advocate the NCE edition of _PL_ for these reasons though they are rewarding. Rather I encourage those who are interested in Milton, _PL_, and poetry to get a copy of the NCE because of its editor's philosophy on footnotes. The footnotes are what separate one edition of poetry from another, and Scott Elledge's footnotes to _PL_ were made with the following prescription: "No one, I think, should interrupt his or her first reading of a poem, or a substantial part of it, by looking to the bottom of the page for help. The best way to read is to listen to the poet , the way one listens to someone speaking; then if one is attracted to what one hears, or is curious about it, one can go back over the poem, or a passage in it, consulting the notes. In my opinion one should read a poem before one begins to study it" (2). Finally, Elledges, footnotes to _PL_ are so rewarding to read because of their etymological emphasis.

If one is willing to spend the time delving into this great work (and it should be noted that it takes a lot of time & patience to do so), one should spend the few extra $$ and pick up the Norton Critical Edition. The advantage of this publication is that not only do you get the poem itself, but you also receive critical essays written on the work by such personages as Scott Elledge (who also edited the book), Voltaire, Viginia Woolfe, John Keats, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Christopher Ricks and Harold Bloom (just to name a few). For the serious student of Milton, the literary criticism that has been written is nearly as important as the poem itself.

"Paradise Lost" is the Protestant counterpart to Dante's "Divne Comedy." That is to say, it is the epic poem of the Protestant tradition just as Dante's work is the great epic poem of the Catholic heritage. Unlike Dante, however, English speaking people do not have to worry about anything getting lost in translation, for Milton wrote in English. Great works written in English were fairly sparse before the time of Shakespeare, and this is one of the few great epic works to be written in English since .

What "PL" deals with is the fall of Satan & the subsequent fall of man. Milton attempts to "justify the ways of God to man" as he says in his famous line. Whether he does this or not is a matter of opinion, but what is not in debate is that he wrote an extraordinary piece of literature.

Milton uses the famous "free will" defense for evil in the world and gives us a panoramic vision of heaven, hell, the garden of Eden and the entire cosmos. Regardless of whether people accept this position, Milton offers the best example of the free will argument that I have ever read.

We also get to meet Satan (Lucifer) and in many ways we get to know him even better than God. It has even been said that Satan is actually the "hero" of the tale even though Satan ultimately loses (sort of like Ahab in Melville's "Moby Dick"). While this point has come under much scrutiny,what I can say is that Satan is a magnificent fellow. His speeches are generally the most dramatic & powerful and he has the most memorable lines (such as the infamous "It is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven").

So, for anyone remotely interested in literature, religion or philosophy, I would HIGHLY recommend this poem. You may just find there some ideas which you have never thought of before. An outstanding epic poem which ranks up there with the works of Dante, Virgil, Homer, Shelley and Goethe.

Not only does this book contain the revised Paradise Lost, but excerpts from other Milton works, like the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Christian Doctrine, Areopagetica, and others. Everything one needs to understand Milton's theological beliefs on the creation, the fall, and the institution of marriage can be found in this book!!!

Milton's work is full of beautiful language and very memorable quotes. Even as a devout Christian, his views on the nature of man, woman, God and particularly Satan are fascinating and refreshing. The classic tale of Adam and Eve is given more life and beauty than I would have ever guessed. One of my favorite quotes from the work:

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same?" (Satan, Book 1)

Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till on greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat
Sing, Heavenly Muse...
Not a lot people know that 'Paradise Lost' has as a much lesser known companion piece 'Paradise Regained'; of course, it was true during Milton's time as it is today that the more harrowing and juicy the story, the better it will likely be remembered and received.

This is not to cast any aspersion on this great poem, however. It has been called, with some justification, the greatest English epic poem. The line above, the first lines of the first book of the poem, is typical of the style throughout the epic, in vocabulary and syntax, in allusiveness. The word order tends toward the Latinate, with the object coming first and the verb coming after.

Milton follows many classical examples by personifying characters such as Death, Chaos, Mammon, and Sin. These characters interact with the more traditional Christian characters of Adam, Eve, Satan, various angels, and God. He takes as his basis the basic biblical text of the creation and fall of humanity (thus, 'Paradise Lost'), which has taken such hold in the English-speaking world that many images have attained in the popular mind an almost biblical truth to them (in much the same way that popular images of Hell owe much to Dante's Inferno). The text of Genesis was very much in vogue in the mid-1600s (much as it is today) and Paradise Lost attained an almost instant acclaim.

John Milton was an English cleric, a protestant who nonetheless had a great affinity for catholic Italy, and this duality of interests shows in much of his creative writing as well as his religious tracts. Milton was nicknamed 'the divorcer' in his early career for writing a pamphlet that supported various civil liberties, including the right to obtain a civil divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, a very unpopular view for the day. Milton held a diplomatic post under the Commonwealth, and wrote defenses of the governments action, including the right of people to depose and dispose of a bad king.

Paradise Lost has a certain oral-epic quality to it, and for good reason. Milton lost his eyesight in 1652, and thus had to dictate the poem to several different assistants. Though influenced heavily by the likes of Virgil, Homer, and Dante, he differentiated himself in style and substance by concentrating on more humanist elements.

Say first -- for Heaven hides nothing from thy view,
Nor the deep tract of Hell -- say first what cause
Moved our grand Parents, in that happy state,
Favoured of Heaven so highly, to fall off
From their Creator and transgress his will,
For one restraint, lords of the world besides?

Milton drops us from the beginning into the midst of the action, for the story is well known already, and proceeds during the course of the books (Milton's original had 10, but the traditional epic had 12 books, so some editions broke books VII and X into two books each) to both push the action forward and to give developing background -- how Satan came to be in Hell, after the war in heaven a description that includes perhaps the currently-most-famous line:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in hell:
Better to reign in hell, that serve in heav'n.

(Impress your friends by knowing that this comes from Book I, lines 261-263 of Paradise Lost, rather than a Star Trek episode!)

The imagery of warfare and ambition in the angels, God's wisdom and power and wrath, the very human characterisations of Adam and Eve, and the development beyond Eden make a very compelling story, done with such grace of language that makes this a true classic for the ages. The magnificence of creation, the darkness and empty despair of hell, the manipulativeness of evil and the corruptible innocence of humanity all come through as classic themes. The final books of the epic recount a history of humanity, now sinful, as Paradise has been lost, a history in tune with typical Renaissance renderings, which also, in Milton's religious convictions, will lead to the eventual destruction of this world and a new creation.

A great work that takes some effort to comprehend, but yields great rewards for those who stay the course.

This edition includes more than 50 pages of Milton's other poetry, including sonnets; there are also extensive sections of the KJV biblical text that directly relates to themes in Paradise Lost. Dozens of essays of literary criticism, from the likes of Voltaire, Dryden, Blake, Keats and Wordsworth as well as contemporary commentators such as Bloom, Frye and Adams complete this critical Norton edition.

Teskey believes that the punctuation of the two editions of the poem to appear in Milton's lifetime has `no authority' (p. xii) as the blind poet left the punctuation to be decided by the person taking dictation. `I have therefore punctuated as lightly as possible, that is, only where for lack of a comma the reader would take a wrong turn and be forced to go back' (ib.).

This sounds innocuous, though one may doubt if Milton would have wished to preserve his readers from wrong turns that have to be corrected. In any case, Teskey's treatment of the punctuation does not correspond at all to the programme he announces here. Far from punctuating lightly, he mutiplies full stops, clogging the progress of the poem, and often cutting Milton's sentences into bleeding ungrammatical segments.

He very frequently adds other punctuation marks where there are none in the original, and sometimes the effect of these is to obscure or distort the sense. He puts a comma in the middle of I, 9: `In the beginning, how the heav'ns and earth', creating the confusing impression that `in the beginning' goes with `That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed' (I, 8), whereas the absence of the comma makes clear that it does with the following words as in Genesis 1:1. He puts full stops where the 1674 texts has semi-colons, sometimes bringing the poetry to an abrupt half and breaking its rhythm, as in I, 34: `Th'infernal serpent. He it was whose guile'; the abrupt three-word sentence is not Miltonic style. The full stop introduced in I, 78 leaves the following three lines isolated even though they do not form a sentence:

He soon discerns. And welt'ring by his side
One next himself in pow'r and next in crime,
Long after known in Palestine and named
Beelzebub. (I, 78-81)

Milton is a grammatical writer, who does not leave incomplete sentences lying about. Beelzebub is the object of the verb `discerns', from which it is here brutally cut off.

There are some rare exclamation marks in the 1674 text, as in I, 75: `O how unlike the place from which they fell!' Teskey applies exclamation marks lavishly, giving a cartoon-like emphasis to Milton's lines. Examples: `Sad task!' (IX, 13)He even introduces italics for emphasis, something liable to alter radically the rhythm and sense of a passage.

So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate. _There_ plant eyes. All mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight. (III, 52-4)

The 1674 text has:

So much the rather thou Celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight. (III, 52-4)

Notice that by dividing the passage into three sentences, Teskey connects the closing `that I may see' only with the purging of mist, not with the more crucial `shine inward' and `there plant eyes'. The italicized `there' is meaningless, since it suggests that the Celestial light might be planting eyes elsewhere instead.

I could go on and on about Teskey's rushed revamping of Milton. I urge teachers NOT to used this flawed edition; Lewalski's edition with the original punctuation (Blackwell, 2007) or the richly annotated edition of Alistair Fowler are vastly preferable.

I ordered Paradise Lost in "acceptable" condition I got just what I ordered. The book by itself is a masterpiece, and the Norton Critical Edition provides you of quite a lot of footnotes and references so you can have a more thorough comprehension of the book.

I bought this edition to supplement the Teskey edition. I found the essays in both to be wonderful additions, but the footnotes in this one were far superior. I do have one gripe with both editions: there are no intext footnotes. The footnotes are at the bottom of each page, but there is no indication within the text that there is a footnote to go with the particular passage/line/word you are reading. I believe I have been spoiled by the other Norton Critical Editions of British Literature, English Literature, and Shakespeare.