Lecture 0 | How To Read Paradise Lost for Beginners | Paradise Lost in Slow Motion

Join the live lectures, book clubs, and poetry community at 🏫 https://versedcommunity.mn.co/ The spring 2024 course "Paradise Lost in Slow Motion" has begun! Hosted by the ‪@AntrimLiteratureProject‬, this beginner-friendly course encourages slow, careful, deliberate readings of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Reading one book per week, we’ll complete Milton’s epic in one semester. In this video, I talk about how to read Paradise Lost. What's the best way to experience it as a poem? What should I do about all the allusions and classical references? Is this a work of art that only "experts" can enjoy? These are some of the questions and concerns we address. Then I turn to the epic invocation (Book 1, lines 1-26). Along the way, we’ll learn something of Milton’s life and times and what the poet is trying to accomplish in this poem, and what it offers us. No matter who you are or where you are, this poem has something for you. Works Referenced: Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare (1765) Charles G. Osgood, Poetry as a Means of Grace (1941) Barbara Lewalski, "The genres of Paradise Lost" in The Cambridge Companion to Milton (8th printing, 2008)