First published in 1980. Paradise Lost was once a favourite text
for family reading; today it is confined to the educational system,
which treats it as an object to be investigated rather than a
subject that demands response. Professor Hunter writes inevitably
for an audience of literary students, but he invites them to
consider Paradise Lost as a text that must be enjoyed before it can
be explained. He understands the need to explain complexities, but
is mainly concerned with the onward flow of our engagement with an
ancient poem. Milton's narrative technique is explored as a system
which both encourages and frustrates our native sense of story. His
poetic power is shown to grow from our assent to its brilliant
evocation of "as if" fictions. Milton is a master of audience
manipulation, of dramatic tension and intellectual paradox. These
characteristics are described in the context of the task the poem
sets itself to tell the untellable and describe what no man has
ever seen. The power of Milton's art is traced through his
rehandling of Homer and Virgil and in his daringly individual
fidelity to scripture. Professor Hunter does not try to smooth away
the contradictions inherent in Milton's ambition to write an
English classical Christian epic. He rather stresses the
contradictions as cues to a properly alert reading. And this is
what the book aims at above all a response to Paradise Lost which
is alert to poetry and unintimidated by scholarship.
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