/lit/ - Literature

Should I feel guilty for overly relying on annotations when it comes to reading relatively difficult works such as Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy? To me, these works just seem like a string of random words until I read the annotations.

I know I'm a brainlet, you don't have to remind me, so is there a list of prerequisites for these poems that would help me better understand them?

>no Milton

Paradise Lost, you plebs

Retarded question but whatever.

Roughly how long should it take someone to read Milton's Paradise Lost and actually understand it? Audiobooks (which in my experience are too slow) peg it around 10 hours which seems suspiciously short to me.

Is it the kind of text that takes 10x as long to actually understand as it does to read, or is it's difficulty overblown?