But in his way lights on the barren  Plaines Of  Sericana,  where  Chineses  drive With Sails and Wind  thir   canie   Waggons  light: so...

Jutta points us to a review of Tessa Rajak's Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible and the Ancient Jewish Diaspora Rajak'...

One of the properties of Paradise Lost that we are already beginning to note is the poem's multiplicity of styles. From the grandiloquen...

Here's God in Book III, talking with his Son, about his "youngest son," man. (We recall from Genesis the repeated pattern of t...

In addition to Thamyris, Milton mentions Homer, Phineas, and Tiresias in his invocation to Book III : Blind  Thamyris  and blind  Mæonides...

Here's an image from The Hours of Catherine of Cleves which is a mid 15th century Dutch rendering of a triple-decker gate of hell. Much...

One comment with regard to both Prof. Rogers' and William Empson's discussions of God's council scene in Book III: They address...

The burden of Milton's theodicy is to justify the ways of God to man, and this has led some readers to fault the poet, and others to co...

Immediately after the invocation to Book III, God is presented as seeing Adam, then Satan, then the result of Satan's "assay:"...

From the Wall Street Journal (Hat tip to Jutta and Shaw) Homer Revisited The Iliad and the Odyssey newly told and reimagined. The tr...

Another fascinating 17th century British (Welsh) intellectual was Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (and brother of the poet G...

Another element in the intellectual ferment of 17th Century England may be found among the Cambridge Platonists . Milton left Cambridge with...