How to Read Paradise Lost

This section is, in the whole poem, the one closest to justifying God’s ways – and, from that point of view, is also the one least like a good poem. Parts of it – like the moment when God points out that his foreknowledge of the angels’ fall cannot, logically speaking, take away their free will (III.117-9) – afford all the emotional satisfaction of a game of solitaire on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Quoted on April 8, 2012

Corrupted by overweening ambition, morally tormented, subtle and charming, Satan presents like a melange of the best villains of the stage-plays of Milton’s youth; but his strand of the story follows the epic tradition. To him belongs the journeys, the politics, the battles, a growing insupportable self-knowledge which will, eventually, diminish him to almost nothing.

Quoted on April 8, 2012