Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Editions)

Milton is hard to read. There's no way around it. He was incredibly well versed in Latin and Greek and the famous epics, and intentionally set out to imitate that style with this Christian poem. Thus, some of the sentences are close to thirty lines or more, and are almost unintelligible at first. I am a Latin scholar, so I am used to seeing this kind of writing, but Paradise Lost could be challenging to the uninitiated. That being said, it is definitely worth the effort. Milton set out not just to tell the story of the Fall of Man but also to "justify the ways of God to men." It is frequently remarked that God is a secondary character and Satan is the most well-developed. I think this may be the same technique used by Dante to draw in the reader and have them commit the same sin as the characters. And this is what is most enjoyable about Milton: trying to unravel the many layers.

If you are a Christian, this book may ask some interesting questions. Milton was definitely pious, but he did have some interesting personal beliefs that may or may not have agreed with doctrine at the time.

If you are just a fan of the classics and great literature, I'm sure you will find Paradise Lost to be among the best poems in history, and certainly the best in English.

Finally, the Norton Critical Edition is superior in that it contains about 300 pages of criticisms and background information, all of which aid to one's understanding and enjoyment of the poem.

Normally the Norton Critical Edition is the best, but this book came with pages 323 to 354 inserted upside down. For a rather expensive book it's a bit of a disappointment. This is actually the second 'Paradise Lost' I purchased because the first one (published by Digireads) did not have the lines numbered. I always appreciate the extras that the Norton editions offer, but this was a little frustrating.

Paradise is certainly one of the greatest achievements of English literature. And as an editor, Tesky seems to disregard this fact. First of all, he omits critical punctuation from the poem, which can seriously alter your understanding of what is going on:

"[God} made the stars/ And set them in the firmament of heav'n/ T'illuminate the earth and rule the day/ In their vicissitude and rule the night/ And light from darkness to divide." (VII. 348-52)

This is clumsy editing, and cross referencing other editions will show that the comma between "the night" and "and light" is retained; without it, the sentence makes little sense.

This is only one example of the gross injustices done to Milton's poem: parentheses where parentheses do not belong, misspellings, unnecessary footnotes (literally half of the footnotes you will find merely tell you that two words are elided), and omissions of information that could be helpful. It seems as if Tesky delights in telling you things you either already know or can infer from the context. Tesky's modernization of Paradise Lost is awkward and ill-managed, insulting to the unfamiliar student, and to the memory of Milton.

Tesky does, however, include a glossary of biblical and mythological terms which may be unfamiliar to many (but which were much more recognizable to Milton's contemporaries), and this is hardly found in many editions of Paradise Lost. Tesky also gives critical articles on subjects as diverse as the character of Satan, gender distinctions, and even the agency of the angel Abdiel. While there is alot to learn from this edition, scarcely any of it comes from Tesky himself; he ends up doing more damage than good. In my opinion, stay away from this edition.

People I admire have told me they consider Teskey a brilliant scholar, but what he has done with this Norton Critical Edition is a real disappointment. In short, the annotations, the ancillary texts, and the critical readings are all less helpful than [[ASIN:0393962938 the old Norton edition (edited by Scott Elledge)]]. Elledge sometimes could be a bit pedantic, giving too many Latin etymologies and such. But Teskey has simply abandoned the original audience (first-time readers of Paradise Lost). He doesn't gloss such difficulties as "ravin," "all I," and the odd etymological use of "pontifical." He omits such indispensable ancillae as Elledge's 33-page selection from Milton's "On Christian Doctrine" (and also Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce, and much else). He takes the best critical readings (Lewalski, Fish) and cuts them down to excerpts too tiny to matter much.

That really concludes my argument against choosing Teskey. He also commits howlers in Latin, Greek ("Greek leukos also means joyful"), and English ("tradition" in X.578 construed as a verb; faulty modernizations like "condemn" for "contemn" in IX.306 and "shown" for "shone" in X.1096).

For a Norton Critical Edition (i.e., the extra primary and secondary texts), choose Elledge; its advantages in learning and help far outweigh any of its defects. Perhaps, though, the most helpful Paradise Lost edition for the target audience (first-time reader, well-annotated) is now [[ASIN:0872207331 David Scott Kastan's generous reworking of Merritt Hughes' edition]].

I am not a Milton scholar and my comments need to be understood in that light.

Having read the previous Norton Critical Edition (edited by Scott Elledge, (C) 1993; [[ASIN:0393962938 Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Editions)]]) several years ago, I was looking forward to reading this new one (edited by Gordon Teskey). The new edition is printed on heavier paper, which is nicer to read and less prone to bleed through when I write on it. But to maintain the same size and heft, the newer edition is about 100 pages shorter (587 vs 685). Almost all the critical essays are carried over from one edition to the next. But omitted material includes:

A number of Milton's other writings, including 7 sonnets and excerpts from a number of his essays.

An essay about the religious and political issues at the time of Milton

A brief biography of Milton

Explanations of Milton's conceptions about the universe, Physiology and Psychology, Reason, the Scale of Nature, Angels, God, Freedom, etc.

A more complete set of relevant readings from the Bible (the new one omits the readings from Matthew, Luke, John, Timothy, and James).

I found these materials enormously helpful in understanding Milton and Norton's decision to delete them makes the new edition much less useful. I would have preferred, personally, that they delete some of the critical essays about PL, rather than the explanatory materials to help readers get through the book in the first place.

Finally, Teskey's notes are not nearly as helpful. About half of them discuss how the syllables of Milton's words should be counted. Here's a comparison of the notes to book one, lines 43-46, in each edition. From Teskey, page 5:

44: Pow'r: power, pronounced with one syllable: 'paar.'
45: ethereal: has three syllables: 'eth-ear-yal.'
46: hideous has two syllables: 'hid-jus.'

and so forth. Some of his notes explain odd words, ideas, or allusions to biblical or classical texts. I am certain that his emphasis on explaining Milton's syllabification is important to some readers, but it matters little to me.

By comparison, Elledge's notes almost never discuss syllabification. They are full of information explaining the text. From the same set of lines (p. 9):

43: Impious. The L word means disrespectful of one's parents or one's country as well as of one's god.
44: ethereal: (Gk aithein to ignite, blaze) of the ether, the element supposed to fill the outer regions of the universe; not earth, fire or water, it was not earthly but heavenly, and eternal.
46: This image of a meteorite is more distinct in the description of Satan's fall at 745 ("like a falling star"). hideous: causing dread or horror. ruin (L ruere to fall violently) ruins, rubble; fall destruction. combustion. Cf Combustible. line 233.

Elledge's notes are fuller, richer, and far more helpful to me. Knowing what "etheral" means and how it fits into Milton's cosmology is far more interesting and helpful than knowing that he pronounced it with three syllables.

In short, I would encourage folks to look for a copy of Elledge's version of this Norton's Critical edition. I found it far more helpful than Teskey.

Perhaps when Norton issues a second edition of Tewsky's work, they will restore some of the missing material; until they do, I will continue to use Elledge.

The Kindle edition is NOT the Norton Critical text at all.

This book was written by an Englishman during a period of political upheaval in Britan with the coming to power of Oliver Cromwell. The author was a supporter of Cromwell. Although the book was about the downfall of Satan and his banishment from Heaven and the creation of Eden and the subsequent banishment of Adam and Eve, it was used, at the time of its writing, as an allegory for the deposing of the King and the rise of a "civilian" government. The book is in verse poem and can be difficult to read when first started but once you adjust to the rythm of the writing it is well written and clear.

This review is for the kindle version of Paradise Lost. I thought I was getting a bargain, but you get what you pay for. To begin with, all you receive with your download is the text, somewhat altered from its original and chalk full of typos. The is no biographical information as indicated, and there are no annotations. False advertising, here, folks.

I read Milton’s epic for the first time a few months ago and I had mixed feelings about it. There were passages of truly moving poetry, soaring and powerful rhetoric, dramatic interest, and genuine psychological insight. However, there were also passages of poetry that were not really to my taste, I thought the psychology was sometimes based more on Christian dogmatics than on genuine insight, and I have some pretty profound disagreements with Milton when it comes to theology and philosophy. One might argue that the latter complaints are all theoretical and have more to do with Milton’s “ideas” than they do with the work as a dramatic poem. However, I think that our aesthetic judgments are intimately tied up with the ideas in a work, and whether we judge those ideas to be profound or superficial, true or false. So I do not think that philosophical criticisms are out of place in a review of a work of fiction and I am really more qualified to make those kinds of criticisms since I know a fair amount about philosophy but I know very little about poetics.

My review will focus more on the negatives (as I see them) but I certainly do not regret reading Paradise Lost. There is a lot of value in Milton’s work and I am sure I will reread it eventually and perhaps my opinions will shift with time. There is a lot of beautiful poetry in Milton and Milton manages to make what I think is a somewhat unpromising subject - the battle between God and the Devil, seeing as God is omnipotent - into a fairly interesting and engaging subject for his epic. Now onto the criticisms!

THE TITLE AS PROMISE. The title of Milton’s epic promises a lot and it is to Milton’s credit that he attempted to take on such an important subject for his poem. Milton is attempting to take on a truly universal problem: How did we lose Paradise? Or, to put it in non-theological terms: why do we make ourselves miserable? What psychological traits are at the source of our errors, obsessions, cruelty, and stupidity? Milton is not writing a treatise on these questions but his psychological portraits of Satan and his retinue, the angels, and pre- and post-lapsarian Adam and Eve are designed to answer these questions. The questions: What is Satan’s motive in rebelling? Why does he stick to his rebellion knowing he can’t win? What is Adam and Eve’s state before the Fall? What in Adam and Eve’s nature makes them prone to temptation?, are not just literary questions about the poem Paradise Lost, they are supposed to provide answers to our human predicament and the human condition.

Milton is often praised for his psychological portrait of Satan and the pre- and post-lapsarain psychology of Adam and Eve and I think some of the praise is deserved (particularly his portrayal of the psychology of Satan). For Milton, Satan is really a state of mind, as much as he is an individual character, and it is a state of mind characterized by stubborn willfulness, despairing self-assertion, obsessive clinging, and an unwillingness to let go of one’s own misery out of a sense of injustice. It is not difficult to find real world examples that illustrate how such a state of mind can lead to hell on earth: people who feel wronged and would rather be destroyed, or suffer terribly, and let everyone around them suffer terribly, rather than give in or let go. I will let the reader fill in the blanks.

I am not convinced that the praise that Milton has received for his pre- and post-lapsarian Adam and Eve is as deserved. It seems to me that Milton is really trying to solve a problem similar to the problem that Kierkegaard was trying to solve in [[ASIN:0691020116 The Concept of Anxiety]]: How could sin arise in a state of innocence if it were not already present? Or, how can we explain the origin of sin without presupposing its existence? Kierkegaard wrestles valiantly with the problem and develops a very interesting psychology of anxiety to account for it. Kierkegaard’s psychological analyses are original, profound, and astute, whether you buy into his dogmatics or not. Milton, on the other hand, does not seem to me to have anything very interesting or original to say.

Milton essentially toes the party line by offering the standard theological answer. He tells us that the Fall is the result of Eve’s “free choice”, and Adam follows Eve as a result of his own “free choice”, and God is not to blame for it. This raises all the well known and thorny problems about free will which I will not get into here. The problem here is not that I disagree with Milton’s theology (though I do) but he seems to me to fail to go beyond the official position of his Church. He does not provide any new psychological insight (as Kierkegaard does) but simply gives us the official answer to the problem without really wrestling with the problem in a personal or existential way.

MILTON LACKS DIALECTICAL SUBTLETY: On my second reading of Paradise Lost I started to notice Milton’s interesting use of adjectives like “high”, and related words. On the one hand, “high” and its related words are often used to describe God, or God’s actions, or Heaven and the Heavenly beings. To be “high” in this sense, is to be glorious and rightfully exalted. On the other hand, Milton constantly uses “high”, or verbs that suggest rising or aspiring, when referring to Satan and the other fallen angels. In this sense, “high” stands for a kind of overweening pride. Milton also describes Heaven and Hell in similar terms: Heaven is paved with gold, and Pandemonium is a golden palace. Some readers might consider this a virtue: Milton is purposely contrasting the “true glory of Heaven” with the “false glory of Hell”, or something like that. However, I think it lacks the dialectical subtlety and paradox that are present in the Gospels.

In the Gospels, we are told that the “meek will inherit the earth” and “anyone who loses their life for Jesus’s sake will find it.” All of this is lacking in Milton’s epic. Jesus is portrayed as an omnipotent God rather than a humble human servant, he triumphs against Satan through force of arms, he meets Satan on his own ground, and there is none of the inversion of values that is so characteristic of the Gospels. Dostoevsky is much more successful in [[ASIN:0872201937 The Grand Inquisitor]] where he has Christ triumph by remaining silent and kissing the Grand Inquisitor rather than engaging in argument. This is far more powerful and far more Christian. Milton’s epic would have been more powerful, in my opinion, if he had developed his symbols more consistently, and made an effort to portray the dialectical paradoxes found in the Gospels. If Milton decided to portray the overweening pride of Satan with “golden palaces” and had his fallen angels give rhetorically brilliant speeches, he should have portrayed Heaven as humble and earthy, and God should have remained silent, or spoken in short and simple speeches, rather than trying to outdo the rhetorical brilliance of Satan on his own terms.

THE PURPOSE OF LITERATURE: I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about what the purpose of literature is, what is the intended effect, what do we get out of reading literature, and similar questions. I do not have a single answer but I think one thing that literature does, or attempts to do, is reconcile us to the facts of life. It seems to me that we all tend to have a naive belief, somewhere deep down, that we are supposed to be happy, or that happiness is our natural state, and that it is only temporary external circumstances which get in the way of our happiness. We tend to view things like suffering, stupidity, cruelty, and death as mistakes, as not really belonging to the essence of life. As we get older we often come to realize that these painful aspects of the world are inescapable and ineradicable. This is not easy to accept. I think literature is often our way of facing the ugly facts of life and trying to come to terms with the fact that life is not really how we want it to be. Kurt Vonnegut has a good quote about this: “Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?”

Milton’s epic promises to explain why the world is not how we want it to be and “justify the ways of God to men.” Milton has some good bits about how we should live in the world post-Fall. He argues that we should accept that both joy and sorrow are a part of life, and he writes, when an Angel is speaking to Eve, “Thy going is not lonely, with thee goes/Thy Husband, him to follow thou art bound;/Where he abides, think there thy native soil.” For Milton, there is a reason that humans do not feel at home in this world: they were born in Paradise. This myth is very powerful, it appears in many different religions, and it is a deeply rooted feeling that we all share. Milton taps into some of that power and shows how it is possible to feel at home in this world through companionship, and try to build a Heaven in Hell. This might seem a bit sappy but I like all of this. I find it genuinely moving.

However, Milton’s attempt to explain why the world is the way it is, and to justify the ways of God to men, is less successful. Milton tries to convince the head but he fails to convince the heart. This is a continuing theme in my criticism of Milton. I think there is a reason/passion psychology operative in Milton that leads him to favor reason at the expense of emotion and blame our troubles on emotion. To put things in modern terms, Milton fails to see the intelligence in emotion, and so his reasons make no effort to convince our emotions, since our emotions are fallen anyways. We cannot trust our emotions, they are what led us to disobey God in the first place. There is a debate in Milton scholarship about whether we should really be on the side of Satan - poets like Shelley and Blake find Satan much more interesting and even more sympathetic than Milton’s God - or whether we should be on the side of God. I think the reason this debate exists is because our feelings often side with Satan while the arguments Milton provides lead us to side with God. I do not think this disharmony between reason and emotion is a positive aspect of Milton’s poem. I think it is the result of an overly simplistic psychology.

HYPERBOLE: This complaint has to do with Milton’s style and aesthetic. When Milton describes things he often resorts to hyperbole. A good example is the opening of book II where Milton describes Satan’s throne that “far outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind” (II. 2). Milton does not tell us anything about what the throne actually looks like - he does not even go as far as to say what it is made of, though we might assume it is made of gold and pearls from the later passage. Instead, Milton simply attempts to convey the magnificence of the throne by effectively saying it was beyond anything we could imagine. This has the effect of drawing the mind away from the actual throne and into the sky. This is a general problem I have with Milton’s aesthetic. Milton’s world is grand and vast but unreal.

Milton may have been attempting the sublime, to remind the reader that “spiritual” things exceed the human mind’s ability to grasp them, but, in doing so, he makes them feel airy and insubstantial. He does better when he compares Satan’s size to a whale that a lost sailor mistakes for an island at night. This is a concrete image and conveys something very specific to our feeling. We can imagine the shock of realizing the island we sought for safety is actually a living creature. We get a sense not only of Satan’s size but of the fear of suddenly realizing we are not on solid ground and are in danger of being swallowed by the Leviathan. And we feeling that Satan has bodily reality and is not merely a raging fog. All the wealth of Ormus and Ind is not a concrete image. It is just a phrase that is meant to convey the same thing as “all the tea in China”. Both are impossible to picture. Or, it is like saying there are trillions of galaxies in the universe. It is too abstract to convey anything real to our imaginations. Milton is constantly sending our imaginations off into the void with nothing to hold onto and it undercuts his attempts at sublimity. For something to be sublime it first needs to be real.

CONFLICT BETWEEN REASON AND FEELING: Milton often fails to achieve his intended effect because he separates reason and feeling. For example, how do most readers respond when Adam decides to join Eve after he realizes she tasted the apple? Our reason is supposed to tell us that Adam is disobeying God, he is sinning, and should be condemned, but is that how we feel when we read the scene? I am not sure how other readers felt, but I felt like Adam was being noble, he was sacrificing himself so that Eve would not have to be alone. I know he claims that he is eating the apple because he cannot live without Eve but even that seems noble to my feelings. Imagine for a moment how we would feel if Adam had said to Eve: “You blew it, but I am certainly not going to suffer because of your mistake, you are on your own!” Would we find that admirable? How would we feel about Adam if that is what Milton had him say (obviously in more poetic language)?

One can argue that our natural feelings have been distorted by the Fall and that in an unfallen state we would not only think, but also feel, that Adam would be right to abandon Eve to her fate, but I cannot really shake the feeling that going with Eve is the genuinely moral thing for Adam to do. I cannot remember who said it, but someone once said, “What if my friends in Hell need me more than I need Heaven?” That to me is an admirable moral sentiment. I feel like Milton is constantly putting us in situations where we have to violate either our reason or our feeling and we are constantly being asked to judge our feelings as “wrong” or “misleading”. But not all of our feelings are immoral. At the very least, we feel respect for the moral law, as Kant argued, and without that reason would be helpless to determine our action. It is not just that Milton puts reason and feeling in conflict, there is often a conflict between Milton’s stated theology, and our highest moral feelings. This, to me, is a problem, and it gives the entire poem a hard Puritanical atmosphere.

LACK OF UNIVERSALITY: Milton’s poem seems to me to lack the universality of Homer or even Dante. A modern reader can disagree with all of Homer’s theology, or all of Dante’s dogmatics, and still read those epics as aesthetic wholes, and get a great deal of insight out of them. You still feel that the epic voyages of Ulysses and Dante express something universally human. If you disagree with Milton’s theology, I think the most you can hope for from Paradise Lost is a few isolated pleasures. You can enjoy the music of Milton’s poetry, his turn of phrase, the power of his verse, or its rhetorical brilliance, but these will all be isolated from the entire effect Milton was trying to achieve. Milton was writing a didactic poem to “justify the ways of God to men” and chastise the sinful. This is part of the intended effect. To enjoy Milton, while dismissing the theology, is like cutting the branches off a tree to pick the berries. The berries might taste good but you are no longer really enjoying the tree. You just have a lopped off branch that has been detached from the whole to which it belonged.

I cannot remember who said it, but someone said that Shakespeare was superior to Milton because Milton had too many opinions. That gets at the same thing I am trying to get at. Milton has too many opinions and, if you happen to disagree with those opinions, your enjoyment of Milton is going to be seriously curtailed. Shakespeare as a person probably had lots of opinions but, in his work, he included the whole world (that might be a bit of hyperbole). Milton claims he is going to attempt something that has never been done before. Milton supporters claim that Milton’s subject is the most universal of all themes, that it encompasses all of human life and human history. And yet, Milton’s epic still winds up feeling pinched and narrow when compared with the world of Shakespeare or Homer or Dante. It still feels Christian, rather than Human.

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.