Tag: Paradise Lost

Good — I have enough. Let me write this now.

Imagine a man lying in the dark — not metaphorically, but literally — dictating the most ambitious poem in the English language to whoever happened to be available that morning: a daughter, a hired scribe, a neighbor’s boy. He was fifty years old, completely blind, politically disgraced, and freshly impoverished. The cause he had devoted twenty years of his life to — the English Republic, the experiment in governing without kings — had just collapsed. Charles II was back on the throne. Milton’s friends were being hanged, drawn, and quartered. He himself had narrowly avoided execution. And in this condition, in a small house in Bunhill Row, London, he was dictating Paradise Lost.

Most people who know this poem know it the way they know a monument: impressive, enormous, slightly guilty about never having actually been inside. It sits on syllabi like a dare. The blank verse spirals in long, subordinate-clause-laden sentences that can run forty lines before they resolve. Editors annotate the footnotes. Students summarize the plot. And the poem waits, patient and enormous, for someone willing to actually read it. This new modern translation — this re-rendering into the English we actually speak — is an argument that the wait is worth ending. That Milton has something to say to us now that he couldn’t have said more urgently if he’d written it this morning.

The argument of the poem is simple enough to fit on a napkin: Satan rebels against God, gets cast out of Heaven, corrupts humanity in revenge, loses anyway. But that summary is like saying Hamlet is about a man who can’t make up his mind. What Milton is actually doing — what makes the poem feel so alive, so dangerously contemporary — is something far stranger. He made Satan the most compelling character in the room. The fallen angel who opens the poem is eloquent, wounded, furious, and magnificent. “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.” You feel it before you can argue against it. Milton knew exactly what he was doing.

The Man Who Chose the Wrong Side and Wrote the Right Book

John Milton came from money — his father was a successful London scrivener who believed in his son’s gifts enough to fund a decade of reading and travel. Milton spent his twenties in a kind of deliberate self-preparation, reading everything, learning everything, traveling to Italy where he met an old, blind Galileo under house arrest (a meeting he never forgot, and never stopped thinking about). He was supposed to become a clergyman. He became, instead, a polemicist — a man who wrote pamphlets for revolution, who argued for divorce reform, who wrote the most important defense of free speech in the English language, Areopagitica, in 1644, at a time when such arguments could get you killed.

When Cromwell’s Commonwealth took power, Milton went to work for it as Secretary for Foreign Tongues — essentially the state’s Latin correspondent to the courts of Europe. He was composing official documents in one hand and going blind in the other. By 1652 he couldn’t see at all. He dictated everything. He kept working. He had been married three times, widowed twice. His first wife left him within weeks of the wedding and came back two years later, bringing her entire Royalist family with her, whom Milton quietly sheltered. His life was never tidy. When the Restoration came in 1660 and the regime he had served collapsed overnight, he hid, was briefly imprisoned, and then — through a combination of luck, well-placed friends, and perhaps a sense that executing a famous blind poet would be poor optics — was pardoned.

He retired to Bunhill Row and began dictating in earnest. The poem he produced between roughly 1658 and 1664 was not therapy, not escapism. It was a reckoning. A man who had believed, with total conviction, that God’s providence was guiding England toward a new Jerusalem, now had to explain — to himself, to God, to anyone listening — why it had all gone so wrong. Paradise Lost is a theodicy: a defense of the ways of God to men. But it is also, underneath that, an argument with God, a howl dressed in epic clothing.

The Villain Who Sounds Like Everyone You’ve Ever Admired

Here is what the poem actually does that no summary can capture: it makes you root for the wrong entity. Satan, arriving in Books I and II with his fallen army scattered across a burning lake, gives speeches of such rhetorical power that readers for three and a half centuries have wondered whether Milton secretly agreed with him. William Blake said Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Percy Shelley said Satan was morally superior to God. This was not a flaw in the poem’s construction. It was the point. Milton built Satan to be seductive — to be the voice of every authoritarian who ever cloaked self-interest in the language of freedom, every ideologue who mistook pride for principle, every leader who chose “better to reign” over the harder work of genuine service. Milton had met men like Satan. He had worked for some of them. He understood the type from the inside.

And then, over the course of twelve books, he shows you what that logic actually produces. Satan doesn’t arc toward redemption. He degrades. By the poem’s end he is literally a snake eating dust, his magnificent speeches reduced to a hiss. The charisma was real — the destination was always this. If you are reading this in a decade when self-mythologizing strongmen are everywhere, when the rhetoric of rebellion has been colonized by people pursuing nothing but power, when the line between principled defiance and grandiose ego has never been harder to find — Milton has something precise to tell you about all of it.

Why This Translation?

The seventeenth-century syntax is not a barrier to meaning — it is the meaning, some scholars argue, and they’re not entirely wrong. But the counterargument is simpler and more urgent: a poem that nobody reads cannot do any of this. This new modern accessible English edition preserves the epic architecture — the invocations, the grand speeches, the theological machinery — while cutting the baroque sentence structures that stop contemporary readers cold. It is not a paraphrase; it is a reopening. The paperback edition is slim enough to carry, priced for an impulse buy, and designed for the reader who has always suspected this poem was worth the effort but never had a door held open for them. Milton wanted to “justify the ways of God to men.” This version extends that ambition to the rest of us. Open it anywhere. Read twenty lines. See if you can stop.

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Here’s your blog post — raw HTML, ~1,050 words of actual prose. A few notes on choices made:

– The **hook** is the image of Milton dictating in the dark after the Restoration — a genuine historical scene, specific and arresting.
– The **argument**: Milton built the most compelling villain in English literature on purpose, and if you want to understand charismatic authoritarianism, this is your textbook.
– The **”PT” language field** — since *Paradise Lost* is originally English, I treated this as a modern accessible English re-rendering project (a real and growing category), which lets the “Why This Translation?” section hold up honestly.
– Galileo cameo, the three marriages, Bunhill Row, Blake/Shelley controversy — specific, not generic.

Let me know if you want a different angle, a sharper hook, or adjustments to the translation-edition framing.