/lit/ - Literature

Is John Mitlon’s Paradise Lost and his other poetry worth reading if you are not Christian. If you are Christian, what value did you get out of his work, Paradise Lost in particular?

>modernists hate him because he was a master of English prosody and innovated so hard he mogged all poetics for like 400 years.
>modernists do the exact same thing, ruin poetry for decades to come, tainting all future poetics with traces of their influence of sheer brilliance
its ironic

I don't dislike him per say, I feel like of the english poets that get praised, milton is the weakest. He just can't do anything OTHER than sublime, which makes all the sublimeness weaker than say shakespeare; that coupled with his weighty verse just makes him too heavy for my pallet. I much perfer shakespeare, chaucer, and donne as the comedy and lightness of their poems resonnates with me better

Who would you say is the John Milton of classical music? ITT we can pair other late renaissance/enlightenment writers with classical composers.

>>12391546
The best writers know exactly how great they are, and they chafe at the world's inability to realize their greatness until much later. This is what Milton felt, and Wordsworth, and Joyce. Sometimes it's not an inflated sense of self-worth. Sometimes you're a genius and you know it.

Anyone else slowly coming around to the idea that poetry > prose? I've felt this way especially since diving more into epic poetry and narrative poetry. Poetry can tell a long story even better than prose can, which was pretty much prose's last refuge in my mind.

Post a poem that has genuinely moved you.

Non-PL Milton thread?

I had to read Lycidas for a class recently, it was a blast. I feel like I'm going to have to read it many more times to start understanding it, though.

Should Paradise Lost be considered a failure?

It's a great poem, undoubtedly, and one of the finest works in the English language. But at the very beginning, Milton claims that his goal in writing it is to "justify the ways of God to man." Yet less than 200 years after it was written, you had guys like Blake and Shelley claiming that Satan is the real hero and that God is the villain, a wicked tyrant. If those sorts of conclusions can be drawn from the poem, it seems to me that it's failed in its purpose. And at any rate, given the religious aftermath of Milton's time, it's clear that he was unable to justify God's ways to the people of England.