Is Milton a better poet than Shakespeare?

Epic poems almost have to be blank, otherwise you'd get annoyed real quick. Imagine a song that plays for hours

I'm not knocking it for being in blank verse. I'm saying, especially because it's blank verse, I don't see how it's such a wowing feat.

Meaning something like: a play is far easier to write than a novel, but Hamlet exhibits more talent and genius than, like, a Stephen King book. It's not that the form is necessarily easy mode; it's that the mode lends itself toward being easy.

Milton's verse isn't cramped, what the hell are you talking about.

>less restricted by the form
How so?

>more expressive
Debatable.

And you don't see anything interesting in the narrative of PL precisely because it has been so influential that you don't see the novelty. The poem itself says it will tell "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme" (or something like that, quoting from memory). Did you just read the poem or actually studied it?

>play easier to write than a novel
How so?

>play is far easier to write than a novel

a hackjob play, maybe. I would put the highest achievements of drama well above the highest in long-form prose fiction. It is a very difficult thing to sculpt the inexplicable out of the slaves between what characters say, and have that be understood by the reader or the audience member, than it is to simply indicate that there is such a thing. It's impact is greater, too, felt deeper in the body. At least for me.

slaves=spaces

Thanks, Santana.

for one thing plays are lighter to carry around, ill be fucked if im going to read a 1000 page story about aristocrats having tea in 19th century russia or some shit - its like carrying a house brick in your bag

>there's nothing remarkable nor even interesting in the narrative of P.L.
terrible opinion. how can you not be intrigued by Satan's rousing oration, his journey through the chaotic void, his battle with the Heavenly Hosts, and his punishment? A much greater apocryphal tale than Dante's if you ask me.

fantastic commentary on the natures of man and woman, chastity, original sin, redemption, etc. plus it ascribes so much depth of character to personages hardly mentioned in the Bible. Milton's Satan, Adam, Eve, and Jesus are all fantastic characters worthy of study.

Even the historical aspect: the questions about the ordering of a polity, the tension between Catholicism and Protestantism, the debate over geocentrism, recognizing other cultures myths of the deluge... the list goes on.

If you read Paradise Lost as a windbag's Genesis, you missed out.

That's a very stupid reason.

It didn't disturb Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Pushkin, Hugo, Camões, Aubigné... who all wrote rhyming epics in other languages.

>inb4 "it's different in English"

Byron's Don Juan.

No.

Paradise Lost, cramped?? It's the most liberated blank verse in the English language. Pay attention to Milton's revolutionary use of enjambment balanced by the variation of the caesura.

>there's nothing remarkable nor even interesting in the narrative of P.L
Nothing interesting in its concern with lying and rhetoric, with political allegory, free will and determinism, the relationship between men and women?

Sorry, this is simply wrong. Have you tried writing by rhymed and blank verse? Every poet, and I mean every poet I know considers the latter far, far harder, because rhyme offers a crutch to the poet by creating a simple, pleasant music and propelling the poem forward of its own accord. It's exceptionally, exceptionally difficult to write readable blank verse in the way that Shakespeare, Milton and Coleridge manage to do without becoming monotonous.

And Spenser in English. And Pope's translation of the Iliad.

'There's nothing interesting in Milton'

Jesus H. Christ, I mean its no 'Spirited Away,' but Paradise Lost is kinda a fun story desu :)xx