Inside "Paradise Lost" opens up new readings and ways of reading Milton's epic poem by mapping out the intricacies of its narrative and symbolic designs and by revealing and exploring the deeply allusive texture of its verse. David Quint’s comprehensive study demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion and keywords give structure and coherence both to individual books of Paradise Lost and to the overarching relationship among its books and episodes. Looking at poems within the poem, Quint provides new interpretations as he takes readers through the major subjects of Paradise Lost—its relationship to epic tradition and the Bible, its cosmology and politics, and its dramas of human choice. Quint shows how Milton radically revises the epic tradition and the Genesis story itself by arguing that it is better to create than destroy, by telling the reader to make love, not war, and by appearing to ratify Adam’s decision to fall and die with his wife. The Milton of this Paradise Lost is a Christian humanist who believes in the power and freedom of human moral agency. As this indispensable guide and reference takes us inside the poetry of Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost reveals itself in new formal configurations and unsuspected levels of meaning and design.

Vol. 1: "This authoritative text of the first edition of John Milton's Paradise lost transcribes the original 10-book poem, records its textual problems and numerous differences from the second edition, and discusses in critical commentary the importance of these issues"--Provided by publisher.

"Including Paradise lost, Paradise regain'd & 50 other works" -- Cover.

The author demonstrates that the apparent contradictions in the poetic, dramatic, and conceptual framework of Paradise Lost are purposive, indeed central, to Milton's kinesthetic poetics.

The present study examines the relationship of Milton's Adam and Eve, their different identities, and their different roles, and explicates the link between the nature of their relationship and the dramatic developments of the biblical story. The story is considered in the light of Milton's ethics as explicated and implicated in Paradise Lost , which are crucially different from the present-day ethics which we naturally tend to superimpose or take for granted. He makes use of two particular means of investigation. Firstly, the author provides a technical analysis of Milton's style, with an emphasis on verbal (often latinate) ambiguity and on a feature hitherto hardly described in Milton criticism, namely syntactical ambiguity, all yielding extra information. Secondly, on the basis of newly found verbal parallels between Milton's Christian epic and Vergil's Roman epic the Aeneid the author provides an analysis of the intended contrast between Milton's Adam and Eve and Vergil's Dido and Aeneas; on Milton's request, so to speak, the romance of Adam and Eve is put in the epic and Vergilian context. The author's observations on Milton's strategic use of the Aeneid as an antithetic frame of reference for his own Paradise Lost also leads to an investigation into a poem which in its turn uses Milton's Paradise Lost as an antithetic frame of reference, namely Wordsworth's Prelude.