John Milton's Paradise Lost Study Guide

All you need to know about John Milton's Paradise Lost is in this advanced guide to the text. Connell Guides are advanced guide books that offer sophisticated analysis and broad critical perspectives for higher-level GCSE and A Level English Literature students. Written by leading academics, Connell Guides are clear, concise and beautifully designed to help students understand, and enjoy, great works of literature. They are perfect for coursework, revision and exam preparation. Connell Guides are also great reads themselves scholarly, yet approachable and entertaining.

Milton's Paradise Lost has long been acknowledged as one of the greatest literary works in the English language. Yet while many readers have been carried away by Milton's sublimity, others have been daunted by his grandeur, scope and learning. In this brilliantly concise and scholarly book, Caroline Moore shows what makes Milton's verse so extraordinarily powerful and why many critics have misunderstood him. Paradise Lost, Moore argues, is the most profound study ever undertaken of the human act of choice. No other English poet - not even Shakespeare - has ever stared so long and hard into the abyss "between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion"; no other poet has shown quite so vividly the dark byways and infinite strangeness of the human heart.