Paradise Lost: Poetry, Faith, and Revolution

Catalog description

When the iconoclastic poet John Milton published his masterpiece, Paradise Lost (1667), he had already lost the fight he had spent most of his adult life waging: A king had returned to the throne of England, and the radical energy of the English Civil War seemed to have consumed itself. Why write Paradise Lost—an epic poem about the biblical Creation, the Fall of Man, and the dignity of human freedom—at all? Among other things, Milton’s epic is an act of faith: faith in religious and political imagination; THE CURRICULUM 102 faith in the revolutionary potential of love; and, ultimately, faith in poetry as a means to express his passionate “great argument.” In this course, we will take our time reading all of Paradise Lost, considering its revisionary relationship with the Bible, its complex gender politics, its experimental poetic form, and its bold engagement with scientific advances and philosophical problems. Along the way, we will consider a range of theoretical approaches that literary scholars have taken to comprehend a text that one early reader described as a book that “contains all things.” Finally, we will explore the influence of Paradise Lost on later works, such as William Blake’s mystic poetry, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise. Hark, a Voice! Shakespeare, Sound, and Identity