Has a book ever gently nudged its way onto your path? Or maybe incessantly kept knocking on the door of your life?My favorite author kept saying how Paradise Lost by John Milton had such a profound impact on his life. Yeah yeah yeah. Then, when I came into The Archive bookstore, I saw a gorgeous copy of Paradise Lost from 1855 sitting on the shelf. A beautiful red book with the most intricate and breath-taking gold inlay, of a quality that no longer exists. The only problem--a chunk of the spine...

THE CONQUEST OF PRIDE.The road winds inListlessness of ancient war,Langour of broken steel,Clamour of confused wrong, aptIn silence. Memory is strongBeyond the bone. Pride snapped,Shadow of pride is long....T.S. ELIOT, RANNOCH AT GLENCOEWhich way I turn is Hell -Myself am Hell.SATAN, FROM ‘PARADISE LOST’When T.S. Eliot visited the Scottish Highlands in his later years, he saw at first hand the site of the Glencoe Massacre at the time of the doomed Jacobite uprising of 1689. As he mused, who know...

Is Satan coming? Are we in the End of Days?Is the Earth heating, under the Sun's Rays?Is it all make believe, manipulation, or true?Why on this wonderful Earth, is everybody blue?Are we in the Rapture? Impending Doom?Lightning strikes, sink holes and thunderous sonic boomsEbola and earth quakes, hurricanes and tornadoes tooNow I can see why we are feeling blueForest fires, tsunamis, land slides and HailWatching the mainstream news, it looks like Hell!Fake news and propaganda, rhetoric , is it al...

Paradise Lost is the quintessential epic poem and its protagonist, Satan, is the quintessential anti-hero. “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.” It’s almost impossible to read this without, in some way, sympathising with him. Although he is vain, full of pride and evil, he is still a fallen angel. And that’s kind of important. In the early cantos he is powerful, persuasive and godly though he, ultimately, becomes corrupted by his own selfish desires and ruins himself. He is blin...

EDIT 26/12/2018: I'm not answering comments on this review anymore because I find that I have to constantly repeat myself. If you feel the need to point out Paradise Lost is a classic and was written during an era when women had few rights, please refer to the comment section. I'm fucking done. The 50-word review that launched a thousand trolls:Fuck your misogyny. Fuck your scorning Greek gods as false gods, then using its mythology left and right as metaphors. Fuck your punishing the serpent wh...

Milton wrote this while blind, and claimed it was the result of divine inspiration which visited him nightly. There are few texts that could reasonably be added into the Bible, and this is certainly one of them (the Divine Comedy is another). Paradise Lost outlines portions of the Bible which, thanks to its haphazard combination of mythic stories, are never fully explored. In fact, most of Paradise Lost has become tacitly accepted into the Christian mythos, even if most Christians do not recogni...

When I think of Milton's epic poem about Satan and his fall from grace, I most frequently think of two anecdotes apart from the actual work, brilliant and a foundation of modern literature as it is.First, I recall the scene from Animal House, when Donald Sutherland begins a smarmy, condescendingly pretentious question to his class about Milton's intentions for introducing Satan as such an interesting character, punctuating the delivery with a crisp bite of his apple. As the bell rings and the cl...

There's all this debate over why Satan is so appealing in Paradise Lost. Did Milton screw up? Is he being cynical, or a double-secret atheist? And why is God such a dick?But no one asks whether, say, Shakespeare screwed up in making Iago so much fun; they just give him credit for writing an awesome villain. And that's all Milton's doing. Satan is tempting for us because Satan is tempting for us. That's the point of Satan! If Milton didn't make him as appealing as possible, he'd be doing Satan a ...

in middle school i had seen this book lying around the house and for some reason it struck me as very impressive. i didn't ever want to read it but i wanted to give off the impression that i was the type of person who would read it. i did this with a few other books too (catcher in the rye, on the road, ect.) i carried it to school so that teachers would see it in my possession and prominently displayed it on my bedside table to let friends and family know. after actually reading the book for a ...

Portions of this book were assigned for my Brit Lit class. I read about half of the assigned portions. I was distracted at the time by various events in life and wasn't yet a very good student. My professor had done his PhD work on Milton and taught with a contagious passion. So much passion that I decided, after the discussion was over, to buy the whole book. During our five day Fall break in my sophomore year I sat on the front lawn of my college and read Paradise Lost. Nonstop, getting up for...