John Milton's 'Paradise lost' : a reading guide

177 Pages·2011·0.678 MB·English

by  Reisner, Noam, Milton, John

READING GUIDES TO LONG POEMS J READING
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GUIDES
Series Editors: Isobel Armstrong & Sally Bushell h
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The series enables readers to re-engage with the long poem as a vital
POEMS

form. Volumes provide generous extracts, or in some cases complete M
poems, from significant works combined with a reading guide and
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teaching tips from enthusiastic lecturers who have taught the poem. l
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A hands-on guide to this famous epic poem n
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Noam Reisner leads readers through the complexities of Milton’s celebrated

and challenging narrative poem as well as introducing them to key critical P
views. The guide combines an introduction to the poem’s main thematic a
and stylistic concerns together with discussion of important selected r
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passages (substantial extracts from the text are included) and provides
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readers with a basic set of critical tools with which to interpret the text.
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Key Features e

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• Detailed discussion of select passages from the poem divided into three
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interrelated sections – ‘concepts and themes’, ‘style and form’ and o
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‘historical-political context’ – for easy reference
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• Provides a general guide to teaching the text – first time teachers will find
many suggestions for teaching as well as templates for teaching the poem
in different course formats
Paradise Lost
• Up-to-date annotated bibliography
Noam Reisneris a Lecturer in the Department of English and American
Studies at Tel Aviv University.
N A READING GUIDE
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ISBN 978 0 7486 4000 3
Edinburgh University Press
22 George Square
Edinburgh E
EH8 9LF d
www.euppublishing.com i
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Cover image: iStockphoto b Noam Reisner
Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com u
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John Milton’s Paradise Lost
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Reading Guides to Long Poems
Published:
John Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Reading Guide
Noam Reisner
Hbk: 978 0 7486 3999 1
Pbk: 978 0 7486 4000 3
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: A Reading Guide
Andrew Zurcher
Hbk: 978 0 7486 3956 4
Pbk: 978 0 7486 3957 1
Homer’s Odyssey: A Reading Guide
Henry Power
Hbk: 978 0 7486 4110 9
Pbk: 978 0 7486 4109 3
Forthcoming:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh: A Reading Guide
Michele Martinez
Hbk: 978 0 7486 3971 7
Pbk: 978 0 7486 3972 4
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam: A Reading Guide
Anna Barton
Hbk: 978 0 7486 4135 2
Pbk: 978 0 7486 4134 5
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John Milton’s Paradise Lost
A Reading Guide
Noam Reisner
Edinburgh University Press
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© Noam Reisner, 2011
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3999 1 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 4000 3 (paperback)
The right of Noam Reisner
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Preface vi
Series Editors’ Preface ix
1. Mapping and Making Paradise Lost 1
2. Text, Commentary and Analysis 30
3. Teaching the Text 142
4. Bibliography 153
Index 163
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Preface
Paradise Lost rewards a lifetime of reading and re-reading, but it is also
a daunting poem which initially can disorient and alienate fi rst-time
readers. Among long narrative poems, Paradise Lost is certainly one
of the longest and most intimidating in the English canon. Many stu-
dents are daunted not only by the sheer length of the epic, but also by
the perceived ‘heaviness’ of the theological and biblical subject matter,
the sprawling baroque artifi ciality of the poetry, Milton’s ostentatious
pedantry and classicism, and his Latinate syntax and diffi cult idiom.
As a consequence, it is a common schoolroom practice to ease students
into the epic by breaking it up into discrete units, usually focusing fi rst
on the most pleasing aspects of the poem for modern readers – namely
Satan’s vividly realised character in the early books and the captivat-
ing story of Adam and Eve’s fall from God in the Garden of Eden in
Books IX and X. As a result, many important sequences in the poem
deemed by popular consensus (and even some critical opinion) too dif-
fi cult or of inferior poetic quality are often neglected or even ignored,
with the obvious result of sabotaging the proper coherence of Milton’s
overall didactic argument in the poem. The following Reading Guide to
Paradise Lost approaches the perceived problem of the poem’s length by
offering fi rst-time readers and students a detailed analytical overview,
or map, of the poem as a whole, together with a corresponding map for
negotiating important landmarks in the vast body of academic criticism
on the poem. The two sets of maps are inseparable; the various criti-
cal debates which surround different aspects of the poem raise a set of
very useful, and usually insoluble, questions which in turn crystallise,
through the heated debates they inspire, the poem’s unique claims on
our imagination. The analyses and discussions provided in this Guide
are representative rather than exhaustive and aim to demonstrate the
wide scope of interpretation Paradise Lost invites. To grasp Milton’s
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Preface vii
vision in its complex totality and to engage with the demanding ques-
tions it poses about the fallen human condition requires from the reader
both patience and constant attention to detail. The main aim of this
Guide is to alert readers to the complex interpretative choices the poem
demands of them, and to provide a basic set of tools with which to
approach these acts of interpretation by situating Milton’s great epic
historically and intellectually in its time, and exploring some of its major
themes as they emerge from these contexts.
In writing this Guide I have incurred many particular as well as more
general debts to former teachers, present colleagues and numerous
students. Although the emphases and syntheses in the materials of this
Guide and some of the more discrete observations are my own, what
follows is above all a tribute to the monumental scholarship and insight
of the poem’s modern editors and the cumulative efforts of a wide
community of Milton scholars who in their diverse body of work best
embody the sheer range of interpretation the poem continues to excite.
Although it is not possible to acknowledge all such debts individually
in such a Guide, the vast majority of my scholarly debts are recorded
in the annotated bibliography in Chapter 4. From a more personal per-
spective, I wish to register my enduring gratitude: to my teachers John
Carey and the late A. D. Nuttall, who made my initial encounter with
Paradise Lost a more forgiving and fascinating experience than it might
have been; to Colin Burrow for his continued advice and support; and to
Sally Bushell who trusted me with this project and saw it through with
diligence and a great generosity of spirit. I would also like to acknowl-
edge my research assistants on this project, Ron Ben-Tovim and Olga
Barenboim, who between them transcribed and proofread many of the
passages from the poem reproduced in this Guide. Miss Barenboim also
acted as a keen student reader, making many helpful suggestions. And
last but not least, this Guide is primarily indebted to my students in two
different universities and two very different countries who taught me
much as we ventured together across the Miltonic gulf of chaos – this
Guide is for them.
In transcribing passages from the poem I have relied on the lightly
modernised edited text of the poem prepared by John Leonard for his
Penguin Classics edition. I wish to thank Penguin Classics for giving me
permission to replicate a substantial amount of this text for the purpose
of analysis and discussion. It is recommended that students who wish
to read this Guide alongside the poem itself do so with reference to this
edition (for more on different editions of the poem see the bibliography).
In writing this Guide the following conventions have been observed: all
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viii Paradise Lost: A Reading Guide
quotations from the Bible are from the Authorised Version. Full biblio-
graphical details are given in notes only to those items not listed in the
annotated bibliography (Chapter 4) while items so listed are given in
short title form. All references to Milton’s prose are to The Complete
Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols, general ed. Don M. Wolfe (New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1953–1980), henceforth
designated with the abbreviation CPW. All references to Milton’s poetry
other than Paradise Lost are to John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed.
John Leonard (London: Penguin Classics, 1998).
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Series Editors’ Preface
The form of the long poem has been of fundamental importance to
literary studies from the time of Homer onwards. The Reading Guides
to Long Poems series seeks to celebrate and explore this form in all its
diversity across a range of authors and periods. Major poetic works
– The Odyssey, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, The Prelude, In
Memoriam, The Waste Land – emerge as defi ning expressions of the
culture which produced them. One of the main aims of the series is to
make contemporary readers aware of the importance of the long poem
for our literary and national heritage.
How ‘long’ is a long poem? In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’
Edgar Allan Poe asserted that there is ‘a distinct limit, as regards length,
to all works of literary art – the limit of a single sitting’. Defi ned against
this, a long poem must be one which exceeds the limit of a single sitting,
requiring sustained attention over a considerable period of time for its
full appreciation. However, the concept of poetic length is not simply
concerned with the number of lines in a poem, or the time it takes to
read it. In ‘From Poe to Valéry’ T. S. Eliot defends poetic length on the
grounds that ‘it is only in a poem of some length that a variety of moods
can be expressed . . . These parts can form a whole more than the sum
of the parts; a whole such that the pleasure we derive from the reading
of any part is enhanced by our grasp of the whole.’ Along with Eliot,
the series editors believe that poetic length creates a unique space for
a varied play of meaning and tone, action and refl ection that results in
particular kinds of reading and interpretation not possible for shorter
works. The Reading Guides are therefore concerned with communicat-
ing the pleasure and enjoyment of engaging with the form in a range of
ways – focusing on particular episodes, tracing out patterns of poetic
imagery, exploring form, reading and re-reading the text – in order to
allow the reader to experience the multiple interpretative layers that the
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