Paradise Lost

Remember to read the Divine Comedy after mi familia

And also you better have read the Bible already

hope youve read the bible and the greeks, and have a decent french vocabulary

Paradise Lost is unironically better

>translated poetry

i plan on it i bought the divine comedy as well in addition to gustave doré's illustrations for both.

Arguably the greatest thing ever wrote in English.

Protip: if you get bored by the catalogue of names near the start of the first book, just skip it. Milton is only doing that to conform to epic convention.

It's fun and beautiful

As Ghandi said, it must be read aloud. It's ebin—Sublime.

Paradise Lost is the greatest single achievement of writing in any language

Is reading the Bible crucial for really enjoying this? And if so, is Paradise Lost the opposite of it?

Reading the Bible makes you appreciate other books more. :^]

Don't tell me you fell for the 'i'd reather rule in hell' meme. Paradise lost is fully and completely Christian. It opposes Catholicism at some point, but is never pro demonic.

PL is certainly Christian but by no means orthodox, if that's what you mean by "fully and completely". It openly espouses arianism, for instance. And it was understood as such by contemporary readers. It's only in the modern age that we've begun to mistake it for mainstream Christianity.

lol.

Nah. Nothing like that. It's just curiosity. I'm not looking for the "yeah fuck god xXxDEMON666" bullshit.

Actually Philip Pullman is promoting just that in his annotation of Paradise Lost. Total hogwash, offcourse, but it is released by Oxford nonetheless, and it does clearly show him as Satanist.

you're probably not going to get very much out of reading either of these books on your own; see if you can find some open courseware that covers them, and read some of the secondary literature recommended.
You don't just read the divine comedy. It's big and absolutely packed; to give it justice, that is, to get anything out of it like what you should get out of it, will take a long time and a lot of effort

Milton was a Puritan who supported Cromwell. PL is dripping with Calvinist theology.

dude, are u dudes seriously denying that satan was the achilles of paradise lost? but if u read the iliad u know achiles was a savage and hector was maybe the actual "good guy" and achilles ambiguous, or maybe it's not an action flick starring steven segal so there aren't good and bad guys but an ambiguous situation with various entities trying to exert their will on the other

I have never read the bible, and had not read the illiad when I read paradise lost, but It was still a wonderful read, didnt find it difficult to get something out of it, and try to understand as much as possible. Of course, there are things like chapter summaries on the internet and stuff, that you can easily look up while reading it

Is it something I can listen to in audiobook format? Or is it deeper than that?

is there any audiobook of it? already read but it might be rad in audiobook, but then again it's supposed to be read in iambic pentameter so that might get old fast

The syntax is strained and the summary of pretty much the whole of Genesis that takes up the last couple of chapters is unnecessary and sort of boring.

Nevertheless, it's a masterpiece. Milton's characterization of the fallen angels, which bring to an extreme both the highest (amor fati, individualism, "what does not kill us makes us stronger") and the lowest (ressentiment, consumption by vengefulness) traits of humanity, is marvelous, and he has an amazing ability to represent sensory experiences -- when he describes a scene you can vividly imagine not only the sights but even the smells, and when he describes combat you can almost feel the impact of the blows.

Its one of the best ever written.

I wouldn't start with Paradise Lost, but another you should put on your list eventually is Eugene Onegin.

Idk why it gets talked about so little on Veeky Forums but Eugene Onegin is another one of the best poetic works ever made. You have to be absolutely sure to get a good translation though, the Onegin sonnet in Russian is very particular and if you have a shit translation it wont read the same way.

Multiple narrations, probably just gonna pick one and go with it. One has Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, not sure if the latter is good or not.

Onegin in English? Is that even possible, if it is I'd like to know of that good translation.

is it a professional narrator or some librevox bullshit? librevox can be good but usually sucks

The ones on audible are done by professionals

oh the simon vance once sounds pretty good, only 15$, might cop it

Has anyone read Hofstadter's translation of Onegin? I'm really curious about it

You're both wrong. Milton's theology doesn't conform to any already existing Christian ideology, it's the product of his many years reading and studying. Which was precisely his point: faith and reason are necessarily married. His support of Protestantism and his anti-Catholicism isn't a support for any particular thinker but for -all- human beings to be able to think.

I agree with you, but how does that contradict what I said here?