Hello Veeky Forums

Bilingual edition?
I have one, english / italian, and it's just perfect

(Not the same user)

Ideally you should, but the trouble with references is that they go back and back and you'll never cover everything, or even come close. I'd say being familiar with the basic contents of the Bible is enough to make a start.

Read the entire King James Bible with Apocrypha for sure. That's the main thing.

Read relevant sections of the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2nd edition for plainspoken orthodox Christian views on the metaphysics and theology involved. (Not much. You could probably read just 100 pages or so here and there.) You might want to read some historical overview of the Protestant sects in England at the time. Milton was a heretic and not really a Christian by the way.

For other references, read the Greek epic poems, select poems by Virgil and Ovid, the Divine Comedy by Dante, and select plays by Shakespeare. Read just the big ones. There are various other classical poets and philosophers you'd need to know, plus a bit of Spenser, to catch everything, but you can probably skip them. You don't want to get bogged down if your goal is to understand Milton.

Anyway you should have started with the Greeks then the Bible.

After you're done with all that and Milton you should read Moby Dick.

This advice is probably incomplete and a bit misguided.

Which plays by Shakespeare should i read ?

Reading list:
*Illiad and Odyssey by Homer
*Aeneid by Virgil
*Metamorphoses by Ovid
*King James Bible with Apocrypha
*(Instead of the Catechism just look up things on NewAdvent.org)
*Divine Comedy by Dante
*(Not sure what specific Shakespeare plays actually influenced Milton or which ones would best acquaint you with the language of the time. Read up and choose your own. This is probably the least important step. You should read Shakespeare eventually anyway, though.)

It's not entirely necessary in that he doesn't directly reference Shakespeare, but he draws from his dramatic power. Shakespeare would be a whole other undertaking, with more difficult language and references.

Yeah, maybe skip Shakespeare and come back to him after you're done with Milton.

I sure hope OP wasn't planning on doing anything else with the next six months or so of their lives.

I just read Paradise Lost, one of my favorite works. You need to know atleast Genesis and Revelations. For Greek references, Hesiod, Homer, there's some Platonic cosmology so Timaeus and Ovid's Metamorphoses wouldn't hurt. It's a Christian epic in the tradition of the Greeks, Christianity itself has a lot of Greek philosophical influence. So like anything in the Western Canon it's start with the Greeks + Bible.

Although and are spot on, my advice would just be to read it, OP. You're not trying to be a Milton scholar so just read it and see what you take away from it. The language is beautiful regardless of whether or not you 'get' a certain obscure Greek reference. Basic knowledge on the Bible and Greek mythology would be helpful though.

Don't Jezebel post in a thread like this
Delet that now

Well this definitely has me covered for reading material that's for sure.

You don't need to read Aeneid, Dante or Shakespeare, but you might as well, the cycle goes, Iliad->Odyssey->Aeneid->Divine Comedy->Paradise Lost. What makes Paradise Lost special, for English, is that it combines a foundational Judeo-Christian story with Greek epic style and mythology, through Iambic pentameter used by Shakespeare (and Spenser). It's so fundamentally Western canonical I get dopamine kicks just from thinking about it.
Allusions, structure and style aside, if you are set on reading it now you could just read Genesis and Revelations, that more or less introduces the characters

You can either spend months or years reading all the suggestions in this thread and becoming an amateur Milton scholar, or you can get a version with some basic notes and just read it now.

>Why buy the book again when I already have it.
Well apparently you can't fucking read it.

>Judeo-Christian
Get out

See The first one, not genius.com. OP can read the print version and look stuff up online.

>>Judeo-Christian
>Get out
Hah, Implied!
Good post!

>But user, I thought you liked our book club! :(

>Not one, but TWO qts in pantyhose

My fucking dick

Official Veeky Forums power ranking:

5 > 2 > 4 >>>> 1 >>> 3

It depresses the heck out of me to see pictures of beautiful women in groups while knowing just knowing that their heads are all empty and their souls are all poison every last one of them. I wish all women were ugly and their vaginas had no more reproductive value than the penis so they had to deal with hardship and loneliness and didn't uniformly develop this way psychologically. I'm absolutely terrified that Hell is full of women because of how society works.

Get the norton critical edition dude. It has the footnote to need and nothing superfluous

In Hellenistic literature, amuses were goddesses of poetic inspiration, and were typically invoked at the beginning of an epic poem. The Muses were on the “Aionian mount” that the proem talks about, however, Milton was a Christian, and believed his epic poem would surpass all other pagan epics, I.e. “with which no middle flight intends to soar above the aionian mount.” For Milton, the Holy Spirit was his “Muse”, and he likens his inspiration for Paradise Lost to God giving Moses the law, therefore giving creation a definitive account of right and wrong: how to live well and please the Creator. “That on the secret top of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire that shepherd who first taught the chosen seed” = a direct allusion to Moses on Mt. Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments and teaching the newly freed Hebrews of YHWH’s laws.

dude, you should go outside more