/lit/ - Literature

What books or editions of books have the best illustrations? Not traditional children's books. My vote goes to the Gustave Dore illustrations for Paradise Lost.

What's the best version of this to read?

Okay, has anyone here actually read this? The footnotes are longer than the actual text on many pages.
I really want to get into it, but it's cumbersome to go line-by-line with footnotes to understand just what the hell Milton is talking about. The Bible was a lot easier to read.

Anyway, to answer the OP's question, yes, some of the great works of philosophy, theology, and literature would be classed as "apologetics." The category includes everything from Augustine's City of God to C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, and also includes works from people like Dante and Chretien de Troyes. Even Milton's Paradise Lost could be considered a work of apologetics, since it does, after all, purport to "justify the ways of God to man." We can debate how successful it is at doing that some other time.

I unironically think Millennials and Zoomers are going to be part of a "century of resurrection" where so many old ideas and ideologies come back from the dead as these two generations search for meaning in the aftermath of the Boomers and GenX destroying all of that.

Why are so many of them genuine communists? Why, on the other hand, do so many of them seem drawn to traditionalist Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy? Why do we see them studying shit like fascism, monarchy, traditionalism, and so on? The Boomers and Gen X killed everything that the Age of Revolution believed in and worked to build, and now their descendants are hunting in the rubble for things that matter. All that was killed at the end of the 20th Century was the Enlightenment, as everyone acknowledged that the Age of Reason came to nothing but ruin.

tl;dr, the Ancient and the Medieval and the Early Modern are about to come back with a vengeance.

Have you ever tried to write narrative poetry, /lit/? Ballads, epics, that sort of thing?

/x/ is right about more things than most of the site gives them credit for. Now, that doesn't mean they're right about most things, or even a lot of things, but it's not all bunk.

Is iambic pentameter a good English-language substitute for epic meter? Was Milton right to use it in Paradise Lost?

Hey /lit/

I'm sure you'll well read, but how do you fair in articulating your thoughts? Is your vocabulary consistent with your library? How do you avoid sounding pretentious?

I'm interested in your transitional experiences.

On this day...

1667 – John Milton, blind and impoverished, sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10.

So /lit/ I spent 8 hours reading Paradise Lost out loud with other people today and it reminded me how much I enjoy the poem. The time flew by so quickly. What do you /lit/izens think of it?