Where to start with Milton
There is no shorter Milton — there is only a strategy for reading the long poem aloud, slowly, and against the apparatus.
You have heard Paradise Lost is one of the great long poems in English, you have opened the first book and lost the line by page two, and you want a strategy that lets the verse work on you before the footnotes do.
Reading Paradise Lost silently, on the page, at normal prose pace, drowning in the syntax and the classical references, and concluding the poem is unreadable. Or reading it through the apparatus first — every footnote, every gloss — and finding you have read about Milton without having read Milton.
The reading path
- Essays — Montaigne in the generation before Milton, working in prose on the same humanist questions — freedom of mind, the cost of knowledge, what a serious self looks like. A few essays at a sitting prepare the ear for Paradise Lost without competing with it.
- Paradise Lost — Read it aloud. Two books a sitting at most. A modern annotated edition for the classical references. Books One and Two — the council in Hell — are the famous ones; Book Nine, the temptation, is where the moral architecture lands. Do not race. The verse is the point.
Why this order
Milton wrote the last great long poem in English in a verse line so muscular that it has not been matched since — and the experience of reading it aloud is the experience of a serious religious imagination working at full pressure on questions of freedom, obedience, and the cost of knowledge.
Held back, and why
- Paradise Regained — The shorter sequel. Save it for after Paradise Lost; the form is colder and more austere, and it rewards a reader who already loves the long poem.
- Samson Agonistes — Milton's late dramatic poem in the Greek tragic form. Save it for last; it is the most personal of the major poems and reads best after the long poem has done its work.