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I’m not a big lit guy but I read this. The first 10% was hard to get through due to how different Milton’s english is from my own. However I’m glad I did. It got progressively easy to read until it was as natural as anything else. What a payoff.

Never before or since have I read something where I was consistently floored by the beautiful, sometimes breathtaking, use of my native language. Some passages stay with me probably forever, like Adam’s description of Eve.

Highly recommended.

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> I’m not a big lit guy but I read this. The first 10% was hard to get through due to how different Milton’s english is from my own.

I agree. Milton's English is beautiful but easily on the level of an unmodernized Shakespeare in terms of deterring a reader, who spends as much time cracking the puzzle as they do on any kind of esthetic appreciation.

As an experiment, I was trying rewriting _Paradise Lost_ in contemporary blank verse with GPT-4/Claude-2. It was OK, but what I discovered was that what really works is an alliterative verse translation! (I was then informed that it is believed that Milton may have been drawing on an Old English poem about the Fall, "Genesis A", and so this may not be an accident.)

Two example renditions of the prologue:

     1. Man's first folly,    the fateful fruit's taste,
     From forbidden tree's    tempting twig it came,
     Death and doom dealt,    despair in our world,
     Eden erased,    exalted man to mend,
     Restoring realms    of radiant bliss, sing,
     Sacred muse,    who soared on secret summits,
     Oreb, Sinai,    sharing whispered wisdom,
     With shepherds,    teaching truths to chosen kin,
     Heavens and earth    hewn from harrowing haze,
     Sion's slopes,    Siloa's silver stream,
     Flowing fast    by God's grand guiding hand,
     Grant thy aid    to my aspiring anthem,
     Aiming high    above Aonian heights,
     Pursuing paths    untried in prose or rhyme.
     
     2. Man's fatal first taste, the forbidden fruit
     Whose bitter bloom brought bale and sorrow bleak
     With paradise perished, till One more mighty restores   what was lost
     Reclaims the radiant seats—O sacred Muse,
     Who on Sinai's summit secret
     And Horeb's height inspired
     Chosen seers to teach the tribes since time first woke,
     How heavens and earth arose from Chaos hoar,
     Or if thou rather tread Sion's summit steep,
     And Siloa's silvern stream that rushed thereby
     Where dwelt the oracle and rock of God,
     That poured forth fates—now lend thy light, that I
     May soar on song's ambitious wings
     Above Parnassus' peaks, pursuing lofty themes...
     Great matters meet for grandest strains of lore.
     Thee chiefly, thee, heart's truth, soul's purest shine,
     O Spirit blest, who scorneth shrine and show
     Inspire my strain; for thou, who knowest all,
     Hast known since earth's first sunrise. Mighty wings
     Did brood with wings outspread upon the formless void
     Kindling Chaos into teeming, shaping flame;
     To attain the epic theme, this lofty matter,
     In hymns that hallow Heaven's eternal ways.

It takes less time than you might think to get aquatinted with older English spellings, especially if you start at the deep end with Chaucer; it’s plain sailing after. Personally I got to enjoy and prefer the absolute disregard for standard spellings, capitalisation, and punctuation, so much that I find it harder to read, e.g. Shakespeare in a modernised text. More interestingly, there’s the problem of translating or updating poetry. If the poem was written with full self-consciousness of word choice, then the meaning really is lost by “updating” it, and where the poetry is best written, the meaning will be most lost.

If you read the Canterbury Tales, read one half way through and ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right. Plot twists hadn't been invented yet. Those now-cliche plots were new back then.

Perhaps, but I think that is beside the point. I read the tales for the voices of the characters, and for the poetry. It’s like Shakespeare, where the plot or story is usually a bit boring, more of a pretext to the poetry, and not really the purpose.

Not Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays are successful commercial theater. They were performed in his day, profitably. They have been widely performed for centuries since, in various adaptations, usually profitably. And usually, minus the poetry.

You are right of course. The plays are plays. And ”commercial” minus the poetry ;) and yet, the poetry is there, for the non-commercial reader. (I hear they exist)

A decade or so ago, there as a website called "Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog." It was a sort of present day Chaucer, compleat (one might say) with variant spellings, and full of anacronyms like "for the Pardoner himselfe hath written an emayle ful of grete care and wo and muchel language of lamentacioun." I thought it quite charming. The site is still there, but alas, no more doth Chaucer blog. But yea! you can still read the old posts.

> If the poem was written with full self-consciousness of word choice, then the meaning really is lost by “updating” it, and where the poetry is best written, the meaning will be most lost.

Tolkien essentially said this in "On Translating Beowulf". That it is essentially impossible to capture the artistry and effect of poetry by translating it, not only because of the flow and meter but also the specific choice of vocabulary.

Reading C17 English is an investment, it gets easier with each new author. The payoff is freedom from historical provincialism. Only reading contemporary authors is like only knowing people from your home town. By the way, have you read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? It's really hard - you are basically looking up every word in the back - but it is a wonderful poem in the alliterative style.

Samuel Johnson wasn't a fan. He wrote of Paradise Lost: "Its perusal is a duty than a pleasure".

"The confusion of spirit and matter which provides the whole narration of the war of heaven fills it with incongruity. And the book in which it is related is I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased."

That would be totally expected of Johnson. He was diametrically opposed to Milton in almost every subject that mattered: literary style, politics, and theology.

Same. It took me a few attempts to get all the way through it, but it was certainly worth it. Never has Satan been so... relatable.

In an alternate universe, I’m a Milton scholar. One of the things¹ that actually led to my not getting there was when I transferred schools and became a full English major instead of an English-Math double major. While I was the latter, I had registration priority at Pomona College as an English major even though I was enrolled up the street at Harvey Mudd. When I moved to Pitzer, I lost that priority and was bumped from the senior Milton seminar that I had hoped to be in.

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1. The other factor is my tendency to be a crappy student. Being more concerned about learning than grades (or even doing the expected work) is not a recipe for being able to get into a good humanities PhD program.

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