Of course I voted for Paradise Lost which was one of my nominations. I doubt that it will win but if anyone wants a good start on this magnificent and splendid epic to help in private reading I would recommend A Preface To Paradise Lost by C.S.Lewis first published 1942 and frequently thereafter. It's available in Oxford Paperbacks. A good annotated edition of the poem is John Milton: Paradise Lost edited by Alastair Fowler and published by Longman {pb} 1971. Fowler gives very extensive notes on the poem to the point of creating a Variorum edition.
There are plenty of eBook versions {free and paid} available too. I keep a collected edition on my Kindle. Perhaps Milton isn't to everyone's taste, but I find his work has an almost supernatural beauty and tremendous psychological drama.
I hope you will all forgive me if I give just a sample of his writing. Here's the famous lament of the blind Samson from Milton's tragedy Samson Agonistes It's worth remembering that Milton himself was blind.
O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies! O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct, 70
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased.
Inferior to the vilest now become
Of man or worm, the vilest here excel me:
They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed 75
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own—
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, 80
Irrecoverábly dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
Last edited by fantasyfan; 06-28-2011 at 12:50 PM.
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