Paradise Lost
John Milton
Blackstone Audio
Fiction, Fantasy/Poetry
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Cast out of Heaven after rebelling against God, the fallen angel Satan broods in Hell and concocts a new plan: revenge himself by corrupting the Creator's newest and most favored creation, man.
REVIEW: From the outset, I admit that I am not the best person in the world to review this classic poem, written in 1674. For one thing, I have all the literary education and awareness of a block of wood. For another, I am not in any way a Christian, and only know of Milton's source material - the Bible - through cultural osmosis (and nothing of his more specific beliefs, influences, circumstances, or worldviews as undoubtedly expressed in this work). That said, it was something I consumed, and therefore, after a long debate with myself over whether it would be worth my while to do so given the aforementioned deficiencies and overall defects in my admittedly non-religious ability to adequately review such an obviously religious epic, I nevertheless shall offer my review. Consider yourself forewarned.
I've been slowly picking away at classics thanks to Overdrive and my local library (and my job being so mind-numbingly dull I need something to do to pass the hours), and it was a day of thin pickings when I needed to restock my loans for work, so this one ended up in the queue. If I'm being honest, I almost stopped early on, with a foreword loaded with classical references that went way over my undereducated head. But at last I got to the actual content, which - while also full of classical references (despite the narrator/author seeming to consider the ages that produced several of them inherently inferior for not being Christian) - at least was more interesting, written in "blank verse" that does not need to rhyme to have rhythm. Milton relates the fall of Satan and of man in epic format, with a nice flow of words and evocative imagery, painting vivid pictures of Heaven, Hell, and other realms and their inhabitants. To an outsider like myself, certain cultural assumptions and quirks of the source material start looking like plot and motivation holes (or simply rationalizations of cultural beliefs and biases, such as an inherent frailty and inferiority of women making Eve the inevitable failure point), with an air of predestination and manipulation about the whole affair. As for matters of sin and salvation and whatnot as related here... again, I'm not a Christian, so I'm not the intended audience to even begin to dissect Milton's theological points. (I will say that I came into this disinclined to practice Christianity, and I depart the same way, and leave it at that.) Though the plot is a bit thin and sometimes meandering and (yes, I'll say it, though it was doubtless one of the main reasons this verse was written) preachy, I wound up rounding it up to a fourth star for some truly resonant verse and imagery that holds up reasonably well given its age, even as I'm aware that an entire library's worth of references and nuance and literary devices were completely wasted on me. It is a compelling work of epic verse, regardless of one's beliefs.
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