Paradise Lost

A long poem about Genesis.

What did you expect?

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Imagine if Walter White and Darth Vader had a child and you get the greatest antagonist in western literature—Satan.

>>9638647
bored the shit out of me, but i was 15. beowulf sucked too.

>>9638647
A pretty good poem. I also have that copy. I've read it three times now.

>>9638680
since this seems too negative, i liked the Divine Comedy much much more.

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>that part where satan gets beat down by michael and then Jesus shows up on the third day and hurls him and all his fleeing demons into hell without even looking at them

One of the greatest fucking poems in the English language. Jesus Christ.

A somewhat overrated masterpiece. It is indeed great, but I would be so bold as to say that the works that it inspired (I think especially of Prometheus Unbound) were greater. It is a slog, a monster, a brutal Rube Goldberg machine whose message is constantly getting confused in wondrous ways. Unlike most good poetry, I would not describe it as "pleasant." It's muscular and jagged, perhaps analogous to a somewhat more coherent Cantos, given that it is overwhelmingly allusive and formally outrageous for its time, so much so that "Glorious John" had to rhyme it in order to make its contradictions more palatable to the reading public of the day. It smacks here and there of genuine divine inspiration, although Eliot is right in pointing out that Milton works by the tectonic movement of large passages more than by the crafting of individually sublime or beautiful lines which is something of a drawback for a sensualist/aestheticist like me, although you do certainly get those from time to time (for instance, that unforgettable attribute of Eve, "sweet, reluctant amorous delay"). When I think of Milton, I think of the conflicted, almost raging Michelangelo who painted The Last Judgement, whose figures so expertly skirt the grotesque, although at the end of the day perhaps I prefer Michelangelo. But Milton is more than worth reading solely to know who it is that the great romantics were appropriating and reacting against. Milton is mighty because he has both the pedant God and the rebel Satan in him. He released those huge, frightening, almost grotesque, at times bathetic figures from the marble block of his own mind.

>>9638647
Overly long 17th century The Avengers, deus ex machina.