Open Book

How to Read John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Books 2-3

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There are three parts of this episode, which follows Episode 3 of this season:

  1. First, we’ll consider how Milton, the blind poet, deals with the difficulty of describing indescribable things; 
  2. then we’ll resume the story with the debate in Hell, and discover how the Oxford English Dictionary can illuminate its terms; 
  3. and finally we’ll eavesdrop on a conversation between God and his Son, to consider how God can know what will happen without causing it to happen, and how God and Milton endow characters with traits to respond to their circumstances. 

    4. As ever, the source of my quotations from Paradise Lost is Gordon Teskey’s 2005 Norton edition.

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    Open BookBy Michael Ullyot

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