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Milton's Paradise Lost is a super-awesome epic poem, for those of you who aren't familiar with it. And it's all about the fall of Satan from Heaven and subsequently the fall of Man from Paradise in Eden. So, it's basically the greatest literary work in the English language, and I'm wondering who has read it.

I posted in R&P because it's just slightly too religious to be anywhere else, but we can talk about actual religion or the text. I just finished books IV and V yesterday, and they were incredible. Anyone else read it? Thinking of reading it? Confused about what the heck it is?

I read it in college...even had to memorize some of it. It's certainly deserving of its status as a classic. I still have my Milton book somewhere...

Mike

A great poem. It's been a very long time since I read it, though. I'll have to see if I can snag a copy.

I also like Dante's The Divine Comedy, though I never completed Paradisio.

At one time, back in college, I had considered writing my own religious epic poem, but got sidetracked (which reminds me: I need to get back to work on Jedi: Renegade sometime).

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The Divine Comedy is kinda boring, at least the Inferno is.

It's like a travel brochure to the pits of Hell.

Well that is the basic synopsis of it.

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I've heard of Paradise Lost, but haven't read it (at least not yet) We'll be reading the Divine Comedy in Lit this year, though, Hope it's good.

We'll be starting paradise lost soon, I believe. We've read some of milton's sonnets.

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The Divine Comedy is about the author, Dante, being taken as a traveler through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It's pretty intense. He wrote it all in terza rima which is this amazing interlocking poetic form (if you get a real treat the translation will be in the same form). He describes hell, and there's some pretty awesome stuff in there, and talks about what type of people end up where.

Dante uses a lot of the poem to pay tribute to poets and philosophers of the past, so it's pretty interesting to see what he does with that.

and if i'm correct, Dante also meets God at one point in the Paradiso, and the author has a sort of humbleness about it, God never speaks in the poem and God isn't really descirbed, it's just a divine light.

The Inferno is pretty much as follows:

I saw some people in this level of Hell.
They were suffering, in a way that's sometimes ironic.
Then I went to the next level of Hell.

Also, it's funny how he writes Beatrice as caring for him so much, when in actuality she barely knew he existed, and he was kind of her stalker. They supposedly met only twice, and for some reason he was obsessed over her.

Not true. Dante cared about her on a deep personal level, in what the poets called "courtly love," which, if you understand anything about the medieval concept of love, is nowhere close to what you call stalking. Not only that, but Beatrice must be understood in Dante as symbolic of something greater than the woman herself; her very name means "Divine Blessing." (note, for example, that it is only through divine blessing, in the form of Beatrice, that he is able to enter the presence of God. Virgil, as a representative of human wisdom, is able to lead Dante through hell and purgatory, but cannot lead him to God).

But as for only meeting her twice: there is scholarly conjecture about that.

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