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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. From the Introduction to Masson's Milton's Poetical Works.] Paradise Lost is an epic. But it is not, like the Iliad or the /Eneid, a national epic; nor is it an epic after any other of the known types. It is an epic of the whole human species ?an epic of our entire planet, or indeed of the entire astronomical universe. The title of the poem, though perhaps the best that could have been chosen, hardly indicates beforehand the full extent of the theme. Nor are the opening lines sufficiently descriptive of what is to follow. According to them, the song is to be Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought Death into the world and all our woe, With loss of Eden. This is a true description, for the whole story bears on this point. But it is the vast comprehension of the story, both in space and time, as leading to this point, that makes it unique among epics, and entitles Milton to speak of it as involving Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. It is, in short, a poetical representation, on the authority of hints from the Book of Genesis and other parts of the Bible, of the historical connection between Human Time and Aboriginal or Eternal Infinity, or between our created World and the immeasurable and inconceivable Universe of Pre-human Existence. So far as our World is concerned, the poem starts from that moment when our newly-created Earth, with all the newly-created starry depths about it, had as yet but two human beings npon it. These consequently are, on this side of the pre-supposed Infinite Eternity, the main per- sous of the epic. But we are carried back into this pre-supposed Infinite Eternity; and the grand purpose of the poem is to connect, by a stupendous imagination, certain ev...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217257138 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217257135 |
| Weight | 0.47 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.32 In |
| List Price | $15.22 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 138 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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