Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost

Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost

Poole, William

Hardcover

Literary FiguresLiterary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 0674971078
ISBN13: 9780674971073
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: Oct 9 2017
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.50
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost tells the story of John Milton's life as England's self-elected national poet and explains how the single greatest poem of the English language came to be written.

In early 1642 Milton--an obscure private schoolmaster--promised English readers a work of literature so great that they should not willingly let it die. Twenty-five years later, toward the end of 1667, the work he had pledged appeared in print: the epic poem Paradise Lost. In the interim, however, the poet had gone totally blind and had also become a controversial public figure--a man who had argued for the abolition of bishops, freedom of the press, the right to divorce, and the prerogative of a nation to depose and put to death an unsatisfactory ruler. These views had rendered him an outcast.

William Poole devotes particular attention to Milton's personal situation: his reading and education, his ambitions and anxieties, and the way he presented himself to the world. Although always a poet first, Milton was also a theologian and civil servant, vocations that informed the composition of his masterpiece. At the emotional center of this narrative is the astounding fact that Milton lost his sight in 1652. How did a blind man compose this staggeringly complex, intensely visual work? Poole opens up the epic worlds and sweeping vistas of Milton's masterpiece to modern readers, first by exploring Milton's life and intellectual preoccupations and then by explaining the poem itself--its structure, content, and meaning.

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