Paradise Lost

This authoritative edition of Milton’s great epic, Paradise Lost , presents the poem in the original language (spelling and punctuation) of its 1674 publication. It thereby recovers pronunciations, sonorities, and rhythms often lost in modernized editions. Barbara K. Lewalski offers readers the opportunity to experience the brilliance and beauty of Paradise Lost as that poem was experienced by Milton’s contemporaries. Beginning with a brief historical and critical introduction, Lewalski also provides judicious explanatory annotations that clarify names and places, identify biblical and literary allusions, and gloss unfamiliar words. She includes as well a textual apparatus of variant readings, a select bibliography, and several illustrations from the 1688 Folio edition. Lewalski’s Paradise Lost is the first of three paperback volumes presenting authoritative texts of the complete poetry and major prose of John Milton in original language, thereby making these texts readily available to students and scholars.

Note on This Edition. Acknowledgments. List of Illustrations. Chronology. Introduction. Textual Introduction. PARADISE LOST . In Paradisum Amissam Summi Poetæ (S[amuel] B[arrow] M. D.). On Paradise Lost (A[ndrew] M[arvell]). The Verse. Book 1. Book 2. Book 3. Book 4. Book 5. Book 6. Book 7. Book 8. Book 9. Book 10. Book 11. Book 12. Textual Notes. Appendix: Sketches for Dramas on the Fall, from the Trinity Manuscript. Select Bibliography

Barbara K. Lewalski is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English Literature and of History and Literature at Harvard University. She is author of the definitive critical biography, The Life of Milton (Blackwell, 2000), which won the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Book Award, and which has been widely celebrated. Her many other publications include Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985); Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained (1966); and Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth–Century Religious Lyric (1979).

"Barbara Lewalski is the doyenne of the community of Milton scholars, but she also remains committed to the enterprise of teaching. In this exemplary edition of Paradise Lost both qualities are in evidence: the text is scrupulous and the scholarship rigorous, but both the introduction and the notes are accommodated to the needs of students who will be coming to the poem for the first time. This is an edition that will please students and professors alike, and its sheer quality is a tribute to Barbara Lewalski′s passion to provide readers with all the help they need to understand the greatest of all English poems." Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester "Teachers and scholars will welcome Barbara Lewalski’s Blackwell edition of Paradise Lost , one not only informed by the erudition of a prominent and highly respected Miltonist but advantaged by her sound decision to reproduce the original language, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and italics of the 1674 text." Edward Jones, Editor, Milton Quarterly "For the student or general reader, looking for an old–spelling edition that is faithful to the original punctuation, this edition has much to recommend it. Its annotation is crisp, purposeful and well–judged." Thomas N. Corns, University of Wales, Bangor "A superb teaching text. Lewalski’s edition respects Milton’s original poem and offers supremely clear introductions, bibliography and special material to guide the student reader and educated lay person alike to new discoveries in a work that, quite simply, has it all: good, evil, God, Satan, humans, angels, love, despair, war, politics, sex, duty, and sublime poetry—set in a cosmic landscape that inspires wonder and seduces new readers in every generation." Sharon Achinstein, Oxford University