Did You Find Paradise Lost Hard to Read?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

More than anything it just takes an ability to sink into Milton's utterly unique rhythms and language. Once you do, there's nothing else like it in English lit.

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Is there anything else that even comes close to it?

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Originally Posted by astrum

Is there anything else that even comes close to it?

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There's Keats' abandoned Hyperion, which he abandoned precisely because he found it too Miltonic (which is too bad, because it's as good an imitation as I've found). In general, I think most of the poets after Milton who were inspired by him either ended up as bad imitations or realized they couldn't better what Milton had done and needed to find their own voice. You can hear echoes of Milton in most of the romantics (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats), especially in some of their earliest works when poets tend to imitate more.

Paradise Lost is not at all a hard literary creation, difficult or non-interesting to read. Its creator John Milton had one of the most musical minds of his century, as evidenced by the perfect music embedded in his most earliest works such as Allegro and Il Penseroso which he did as part of his M.A. Vivo Voci. Even in both these early poems, there are allusions as to his mind having become tired of getting immersed in such heavy subjects as dealt with in Paradise Lost. If the hint in these two college-year poems can be followed, we can arrive at the conclusion that the theme of Paradise Lost was conceived in his mind, far earlier than when he was studying in the college classes. Gauging from the musical content and perfect rhythm of Allegro and Il Penseroso, Paradise Lost also has to have rich musical content which we tend to abandon when we read this work, instead of singing it. What is in a poem after its musical content has been abandoned? There is no wonder a few who try to read it find it hard; let them sing it in its original tune which is plain, simple and common, when the poem will reveal itself in its full charm and majesty. There have been references here about recordings of Paradise Lost but they are all more like renderings of prose, doing injustice to Milton, one of the most musical poets in the history of English Literature, second only to perhaps Tennyson. The advise is to sing Milton instead of reading him, and the poem will become no hard at all- to memorize, enjoy and understand.