Paradise Lost

by John Milton, John Bradshaw, John Lemoinne, et al.

Book Overview

Paradise Lost remains as challenging and relevant today as it was in the turbulent intellectual and political environment in which it was written. This edition aims to bring the poem as fully alive to a modern reader as it would have been to Milton's contemporaries. It provides a newly edited text of the 1674 edition of the poem--the last of Milton's lifetime--with carefully modernized spelling and punctuation. Marginal glosses define unfamiliar words,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872207331
• ISBN13: 9780872207332
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The definitive Paradise Lost resource

It is a laborious read, but John Milton's Paradise Lost is worth it. First published in 1667, Paradise Lost remains, many contend, the greatest poem ever published in English, and Milton is deemed second only to Shakespeare among the pantheon of English writers. When reading Milton, be prepared for hundreds of references to Greek and Roman mythology that few of us (myself included) are familiar with as well as works saturated in biblical references and allusions and much obscure vocabulary. Happily, this Norton Critical Edition includes hundreds of notes--footnotes, so there is no disruptive flipping back and forth! This edition also offers dozens of critical essays on Paradise Lost, some dating back to its publication, a couple of Milton's prose works and an extensive glossary. Whether reading for pleasure or for (school) credit, this NCE of Paradise Lost is a godsend.

an Invaluable text

I ordered this text to help write a paper, and it has ended up serving as my primary text for my research. The text is at least as good as any of the other editions I have looked at, the footnotes are top-notch, and the critical articles are some of the siminal works. My only gripe is that there are no visual markers in the text for the footnotes, they are simply at the bottom of the page, signified by line number. Because of this, I sometimes don't realize that there are footnotes on a particular line, but this is a minor problem.

"Once lost, but I was found"

Rating Paradise Lost on a 5-star chart is not even fair.Some books are not to be rated at all, `cos they do deserve more.Paradise Lost deserves your time and your mind.